Christophe Domino - catalogue aide à la création DRAC Basse Normandie - 2004-
translation by Déborah Lennie-Bisson
The exceptional route of this artist gained the attention of the DRAC in 2000, in quite a particular manner. Aged over forty, he decided only five or six years ago to devote himself to painting. To enable him to continue to nourish his imagination through travelling to symbolic places, meeting different people, he received the support of our institution. And indeed, the project entailed linking several stages (New York, Jerusalem, La Haye) of an initiatory and yet not an initial journey. He is an artist above all due to his desire and commitment to painting, an avid explorer, reinventing modernity and its questions in order to further explore today’s necessities.
Arriving relatively late to full-time painting, having nourished the « dream » since adolescence, Jacques Morhaim is all the more hurried. The fruit of these past few years of work has been directed primarily towards a certain deconstruction – revisiting the main themes of modern painting, not so much as a question of imitating, but rather experiencing formative confrontation. Given that he goes above and beyond exercises or technique, a remarkable intensity and a sensation of necessity emerges from his work, concentrated in the space which is his studio, constructed by Jacques himself as a sort of « painting machine. » Though the reduction of means which is an answer to a practical constraint as much as a lesson learnt from history ( through the modesty of the size of his canvases, the reduction of the palette of colours, the choice of basic abstract modernist vocabulary, particularly in his work with grids, through writing which seeks to combine the distanced architectonic coldness with constructivist heritage all the while remaining sensitive and allowing freedom to the uncertain hand) Morhaim’s painting is unostentatious, intense and convincing. Convincing both for an informed onlooker, who finds in his work that which is precisely at stake in terms of modern art, and who finds here well- formulated solutions. Yet also convincing as a discovery of painting, the initiation and maieutic aspects being so accessible and so present.
Given that the work is produced in groups or cycles, the pieces are presented on the studio wall as a work in progress (a piece in itself, « Laboratoire, 2003/ 2004 » a group of 126 small paintings which form a whole, on a surface of 326cm by 142cm ) where each canvas is the fruit of an experience, and the whole produces the experimental grammar of a work in progress.
In the flat surface of a painting, Jacques Morhaim uses various types of surface material – woven, coarse-grained, fine-grained, rhythmic, balanced etc. In the 2004 works, the writings conjugate with even more liberty in this wall of miniatures, thus forming a repertoire in itself. From the stain to the monochrome, from the sign to matter, from the anatomical drawing to abstract cartography, the writings cross paths and exchange. Yet what remains most remarkable in this work, and in the cohesion of the work as a whole, is the appetite with which it is brought to us, the appetite which brings painting closer to the world.
Wherever we may find the traveller within the artist : whether it be in the sensitive or even emotive visions, or more literally in the photographic images, Jacques Morhaim is not exclusively nourished by art. On the contrary, he seeks to mutually involve the experience of the world with the experience of painting, so that each may be revealed as being truly lived-in and truly liveable.