Jean-Louis Bessède is a French artist recognised for his talents as a painter and designer. He is known for using various means of artistic expression to bring matter to life and extract its soul. His work is characterised by a spiritualist approach, seeking to explore the inner being and self-knowledge. His contemporary paintings feature creatures that, although static, seem to come to life thanks to his art.
His artistic approach aims to ‘make the material speak, extract the soul from it, sublimate it, spiritualise it’. This approach is part of the tradition of French spiritualism, which seeks to explore inner experience and freedom of the spirit. Bessède uses exalted gestures that are similar to ‘magico-religious’ or shamanic rituals. This approach reflects the spiritualist quest for a profound truth and an original consciousness, as emphasised by the spiritualist movement of the 19th century. In his works, we find anonymous figures and ‘mythical characters from the history of art’, which evokes the spiritualist search for transcendence and the absolute. Bessède’s pictorial practice becomes a ‘total plastic writing’, recalling the spiritualist idea of the spirit as a living and active principle. Thus, Bessède’s work embodies the principles of ‘spiritualist realism or positivism’ predicted by Ravaisson, where the mind becomes aware of its own existence as the source of all other existence. His art aims to extract a profound truth, reflecting the spiritualist quest for the spiritual advancement of humanity.
In Jean-Louis Bessède’s paintings, the figure is always at the centre of the work. Characters and creatures with often frail and distorted bodies, but who have things to say… and the discourse has changed completely over the last two years. The story of a painting that marks a renaissance.
Even before 2020, Jean-Louis Bessède’s paintings brought together living beings, more or less fantasised. They already occupied the canvas without any background elements to provide any context.
The themes remain the same: humanity, the animal part of man, the links between all living beings. But on closer inspection, minute differences change the meaning of the works that the artist is now producing.
‘Before’, the canvases started from black and white confronting each other on either side of the work, and in the middle, shades found their way somehow between the strength of the black/white contrasts.
Today, faster drawing techniques, more peaceful constructions and a deliberately thin line dominate, where in previous years the artist used crumpled, folded paper caught in the plaster to give a certain thickness on the canvas.
And then, minute details show an evolution: today there is generally a white figure, simple and comprehensible words are scattered across the canvas and surround the figures. And these words are mostly hopeful.
Between a ‘before’ and an ‘after’, the artist underwent psychotherapy which he now sees as a complete rebirth. He, whose life had been marked by a terrible tragedy in his childhood (the murder of his father), has finally found new impetus, and this way of seeing life is reflected in his painting. It is not painting as such that has been the therapy, but rather it is the painting that benefits from the resulting effects.
‘Each individual defines themselves in relation to others, but we must be able to leave this part to its proper proportion. We can all try to find something more essential, undistorted by society and the gaze of others.
