Jean-Luc Blanc: Opera Rock

"Jean-Luc Blanc mostly paints portraits. A traditional medium and conventional genre, his relate uneasily to portraiture's genealogy.... Like phantoms, the people he paints have no corporeality, much less a developed identity; and like actors, his subjects appear 'in character,' void of self, projecting the lives of others."
-Alex Farqhuarson

"The only reality is the darkroom of the artist's mind-sensitized by feeling and memory-which develops truth from the minutiae of impressions, to reveal the timeless laws underlying apparent chaos."
-Rhonda Lieberman

This is the first monograph on the French artist's enigmatic "glam" oeuvre. It documents his retrospective exhibition at the CAPC Musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux, where Blanc's works have been juxtaposed to those of forty-five historic and contemporary artists as well as to numerous artifacts, antiques, jewels, crystals, curios, and naturalia; thus, setting up what shall be considered a "collective retrospective."

Contributors Alex Farqhuarson, Thierry Jousse, Melvin Moti
Interview by Alexis Vaillant