Ceysson & Bénétière

In what era have we seen as rapid and extensive changes in bodies as in ours? Regardless of the regressions that we witness today, often stemming from religious origins, it remains obvious that questions related to the emancipation and modification of bodies are today ubiquitous. From tattoos, scarifications, piercings, and implants to gender transitions and the myriad ways of sculpting one's body, our Western societies are witnessing the emergence of strange, ambivalent yet magnificent beings everywhere. The aesthetic realms of minorities united under the LGBTQIA+ acronym have profoundly altered our relationship with ourselves.

If there is one artist who anticipated and embodied this upheaval in shapes of identity, it is undoubtedly Jean-Luc Verna. When presenting his plastic (or non-plastic) work, we cannot leave his persona aside. Like Philippe Ramette, also from the Villa Arson, Verna has fashioned and built a character that is the synecdoque of his work. Skilled draftsman, Verna is extensively and beautifully tattooed. As a visual artist, he has sculpted his body to the point of dancing (often with Giselle Vienne); as an actor, he shapeshifts in the films of Brice Dellsperger; as a singer (with Apologize), he performs publicly and on vinyl, and so on. Wherever you encounter Verna, he is always the artist of his polymorphic life and work.

Jean-Luc Verna's visual universe is primarily rooted in the punk and post-punk time of his generation and our cultural history. Siouxsie, the lead singer from the Banshees, is one of his greatest musical and societal muses. As is often suggested, a significant portion of his inspiration comes from the “trash" or "gothic" version aspect of rock aesthetic. But despite the violence of this world, his works on paper (drawings, etc.) exhibit a finesse, a softness and delicateness that seem to be at odds with the British graphic style of the 1980s. That's because Verna is an artist of contrasts.

Classical statuary, pornographic imagery, symbolist aesthetics, and reminiscences of Hollywood cinema (see the iconic "Paramour") blend freely within Verna’s work. Most of his drawings stem from transfers of printed images: their reproduction is then enhanced, literally made up, to accentuate the auratic effect of the transfer. The original photos drift towards a distant realm of faded memory to make room for the blurred present of the drawing. In Jean-Luc Verna's work, doubles are ghosts torn from oblivion. They are both unknown and familiar masks, metaphors. While all his images carry an undertone of unease or are tinged with melancholy, if they seem imbued with a heavy and dark atmosphere, if death casts a fleeting shadow on them, it takes nothing out of the affectionate attention Verna pays to his subjects, but does not prevent the sarcastic irruption of the monstrous and the burlesque.

The blatant kinship between Jean-Luc Verna's drawings and fin-de-siècle or decadent styles can be interpreted as the anxious intuition of another end, the one looming for our world. In 1994, the artist had himself photographed naked and swaying on a deserted country road with a sign in his right hand that read: "THE END." Quite a program for a budding artist. The irony of the situation set the tone and inaugurated this "practice of joy in the face of death," to borrow a title from Georges Bataille that applies to both the work and life of Jean-Luc Verna. Under this light, one understands the importance of dance in his life. It counterweights the pessimism of lucidity in favor of the optimistic freedom to laugh at the worst.

The present exhibition features words created over a period of twenty years. It shows the spiraled continuity of this humorous and scabrous work centered around desire. Sometimes sentimental, sometimes cruel, these images and installations together create a theater of fantasies that sometimes dissolve into moving portraits of birds. Suddenly, the tone changes and the bird, whether unsettling or cute, seems to suspend the frenzied dance of faces and bodies troubled by the abyssal contradictions of insatiable desire.