Précédent/Previous

Suivant/Next

Jean TRUEL, born in BEZIERS in southern FRANCE in 1938, is a painter and a spéléologist.

His easel paintings have been created inside different caves, all over the world. Facing the mineral night, the abyss explorer challenges chaos an void in an undefined environment.

The paintings, prior to being subterraneans lanscapes, actually express itineraries the speoleo-painter translates his own vision of space from the feelings his body forwards from physical contact with nature's forces. It's a primitive pictorial experience that starts an abstract figuration of space.

Such a claim on primitive arts has led the painter to materializing his art in nature. The history of caves belongs to the prehisroy of art : Such is the case for this painting that marks its own story in the very places where it was generated, this recovering its origins.

In the open air structures of REGAGNAS, a vast painting covering an acre or more, the maze of signs and hues retraces the itineraries along sundry caves. With the Wall paintings in BRAMABIAU cave - in southern France - the painter's universe ad the subterranean world decome closely linked. These contemporay wall painting in a place widely open to a large audience, show that the cave is, above all, a cultural space invented by prehistoric painters, who where the first artists there.

In his subterranean workshops, Jean TRUEL considers his painting as the ultimate point where the matter of cave becomes painting and starting point for new explorations.

The representation of the cave on the very walls of the cave itself, bring in new proportions of the physical space on the cave's volume. From this itinerary along which pictural images settle in the non-image of subterranean darkness, paintings and photographs are together rooted in the matter itsel of the cave that bears the pictorial signs of their origin.

The image refers to the image that creates a cultural horizon beyond which wild nature is still alive. With HAUVIETTE's TRUEL photographs that closely follow on the making of wall paintings, the physical environnement of the cave directly shift from matter into image with the print of colours left on the film while the primal work is being elaborated.

It's the memory of the moment of creation as seen by an alter -an other- which is is show in the simultaneousness of painting action, of the creation of the image by the speleo-painter, with the image captured on the spot by the photographer.

The transformation of the raw material of spaces, forcibly limited as far as pictorial matter is concerned, starts a debate on the image that is being born in the heart of the cave. In the physical maze of the cave, signs and hues, rock and water undergo their metamorphosis in the chemical combinations of the photograph.

In the labyrinth of electronic circuits, the virtual actuality of digital image joins the mental space that is being elaborated in the explorer's intelligence whose imagination is but an anticipation on reality.