Artists

Jean-Michel Sanejouand

Press release

Ten years after the artist’s first exhibition at the gallery, Jean-Michel Sanejouand: Real Spaces, Imaginary Spaces brings together two major bodies of his work, Calligraphies d’humeur [1968-1978] and Espaces-Peintures [1978-1986]. Some of the works shown on this occasion were presented at the artist’s retrospective exhibitions at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lyon in 1986 and at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1995. These two events provided decisive institutional recognition for a career governed by an internal logic in which each series paves the way for the next and allows it to be reborn in a new form.

While highlighting the seminal role of this period [1968-1986], the exhibition at Art: Concept also sheds light on the transitions, ruptures, and continuities that mark Jean-Michel Sanejouand’s thinking and practice. Sanejouand has constantly reinvented the terms of his relationship with space (real or imaginary), questioning its definition as well as its “organization” through various media. His “spatial techniques,” in which painting occupies the foreground, function as revelations of places whose boundaries we sometimes struggle to perceive, engaging not only our consciousness but our entire bodies.