Jean Pierre Pincemin
Jean-Pierre Pincemin, born in 1944, began his professional career as a mechanic in a factory. His revelation for painting occurred during his first visit to the Louvre. "My great affair with painting is to love painting, not to know how to paint, to invent ways to paint and quite quickly, to be able to identify with Western painting." At the age of 23, he decided to devote himself entirely to painting, permanently leaving his job as a turner. His training was driven by passion and a deep desire to create.
After a period as an art critic, Pincemin created his first paintings and sculptures, holding his first exhibition in 1968. His works, distant from traditional methods, incorporated innovative techniques such as folds and imprints of bricks or mesh, transforming the canvas into a new material of expression.
From 1968 to 1973, Pincemin developed a series of works known as "glued squares." For these works, he first immersed the canvas in a bath of paint, then cut and assembled it into irregular geometric shapes, squares, or rectangles.
In 1971, he joined the Supports/Surfaces movement, an artistic group founded in the late 1960s. This movement, initiated by Matisse with his cut-outs, was characterized by new abstraction and hard edge, influencing both the United States and France with artists like Simon Hantaļ and Claude Viallat. The focus was on the physical reality of the painting.
In the late 1990s, Jean-Pierre Pincemin decided to renew his artistic approach, exploring and assimilating all styles, supports, techniques, and genres. Despite being affected by arthritis, he created polychrome sculptures representing an assembly of painted and stapled pieces of wood. His themes of inspiration included trees, religious subjects, genre scenes, sometimes erotic, and portraits.
Recognized for his technical audacity, Pincemin experimented with various materials, mixing oil with or without tar and using other personal mixtures. His works unfolded on various supports such as canvas, paper, and photographic posters, affirming his status as a pioneer in the contemporary art world.