With three paintings of 1989 in the museum's collections since 1991, Jacques Clauzel has recently presented the Réattu Museum with 180 engravings, taken from a particularly abundant production of more than 600 works dating from 1983 to 2009. It is a valuable donation which provides us with a privileged insight into his private 'laboratory'. Intimately woven together with his pictorial research, engraving is, for Clauzel, an astonishing area for experiment, "a new and indispensable element", "a base for taking things further". With a tremendous appetite, he explores line by piling on and combining techniques, before diverting and reinventing them. The blade mark of the dryprint (where the metal plate and the artist's hand are at their closest), the sensuality of the aquatint, the tension given to the lines by the aqua-fortis, the faux carborundum (a highly unusual method...which he applies to chocolate wrappers), not to forget his technique of beating with a screwdriver.... these are all gestures which, for him, constitute important liberties. A graduate in painting and a Prix de Rome finalist (as was Jacques Réattu, who took the prize in 1790…) Jacques Clauzel initially worked with large sheets of paper which he cut up. An eight year stay in Africa shaped his method of work and saw him abandon painting to devote himself to photography. Recruited by the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Montpellier on his return to France in 1973, Jacques Clauzel decided to start over from scratch. He returned to painting, this time approaching it through numerous automatic drawings. In 1985, he threw away his brushes and paints and broke with what he knew. He began to use brown paper, which he folded, crumpled and piled, using only the crudest acrylic paint available and masonry tools. His works mirror building ("Deep down I'm a painter of buildings...") His development and his experiments using all sorts of techniques have enabled him to return over and over again to a fundamental examination of line; the most ancient component of drawing that goes back to archaic activity. He bought a press, took up working with aqua-fortis: his many encounters and insatiable desire to try out new registers did the rest!
To mark this donation, the artist has produced a print and the museum has published a catalogue, with an original text by PAULE PLOUVIER.
