The work of Juliette June germinates in three soils : oil painting, collage and drawing, performance.
Multicolored reflections on the water, bodies lying on a stone, the sunlight through a foliage, children’s spades and buckets scattered on a beach, are among the multiple subjects used by the artist on her vivid colourful pantings. Yet the narrative isn’t always obvious at first sight. The figurative gives sometimes space to a poetical imaginary world that opens up to different interpretations. Formats can vary from small studies to large masterpieces.
The colourful drawings are completed with acrylic pens, some include collage. If They are sometimes drawn from observation (an automnal afternoon in the harbour next door, a tree, a face), they are more often an exteriorisation of a physical sensation: a flexibility in the thorax, the permeability of the hands, or even giving birth to abstract shapes.
Performance, at times, takes a shamanic turn or becomes humorous: a few words, a direct relationship with the audience, a dance, a drawing made on the spot.
Fascinated by the sensory abilities of the human body, the artist is often inspired by moments of intense reality: the sun rising on a path, the deep red of her period in the shower, the silver light on a smooth sea. Refraining voluntarily from the use of a camera, she practises her memory or observatory senses in order to translate this energetically fabric that makes us receive reality and attempts to give shape to it.
« The desire to make shapes that, implicitly, tell that I am the sea I’m looking at, the person I’m painting, the stone I’m resting on or at least that I am part of that same matrix, is voracious. »
For Juliette June, the rôle of the artist comes down to three words: feeling, creating, preserving. Feeling the Hot and cold, the light and dark, receiving those sensations, absorbing them and then elaborate a Visual language: creating a shape that translate them in order to transmit it to the audience. It is a way to preserve the link with ourselves, activate our consciousness, nourish our soul with poetical material and thus stimulate our bodily sensations. The circle is complete.
Juliette June’s creative process looks like an artistic research in the spiritual sense (from the inside to the inside, the body as a doorway to other dimensions) where “the artist is the hand that, through an appropriate usage of the form, puts the human soul into vibration” [1] as Kandinsky wrote it, and in that sense, moves away from a solely plastic research specific to some aspects of contemporary painting.
The work of the artist is not politically engager, unless, reaffirming life as poetry is a political act. What is more subversive today than painting two naked women dancing in the woods?
May it be in the materiality of the painting, drawing or the instantness of the performance, the artwork of Juliette June tries to give form to the physical sensations giving the real world its poetical nature back.
[1]Wassily Kandinsky, Du spirituel dans l’art et dans la peinture en particulier, 1954, Edition Denoël p.116