Jean Arcelin

Jean Arcelin
Born June 22, 1962
Paris, France
Nationality Switzerland Swiss
Education Sorbonne, Paris
Known for painting
Movement Realism
Website
www.jean-arcelin.fr

Jean Arcelin is a French and Swiss painter born in Paris in June 1962. He studied at Charpentier, a licensed art history school at the Sorbonne,[1] where he developed an interest in seventeenth and eighteenth century painting. His paintings incorporate elements of false realism and figurative art, as well as some remote elements of Baroque.

His pictorial compositions are simply the results of his imagination without any cinematographic aids, using principally the oil canvas technique called “alla prima”, keen to the original impressionist painters, which cancels the initial undercoated and glazed steps. Arcelin uses references, like Baroque, in order to create an effect, striving to make each painting a fully-fledged world where viewers can travel and find ideas.[2] The spaces in the paintings are alive and are executed with rapid and spontaneous gesture. Painfully realized details create the sensation of rushing past the scene then coming to a complete stop.[3] Landscapes edge with the urban sea, and combine with portraitist gesture. He takes corners of Paris, cafe chairs piled up in the angle of view of a monument, or the dressing room of a theatre, and portrays them empty of all human presence. His luminous depictions of interiors or landscapes are so charged that you can sense the personalities that inhabit the rooms or spaces, though they are absent.

The seascapes summon up the emotive works of J.M.W. Turner or Albert Bierstadt, while the interiors and an Italianate fountain scream John Singer Sargent. An Arcelin painting can be a false realistic: it is figurative without becoming complex.

Presented at the FIAC in 1993 and 1995, he participated in the Ebel sponsored Art and Culture in Basel and in Villa Schwob, Switzerland from 1990 to 1995 and exhibited in 1989, 1990 and 1999 at the Institut de France.

He created paintings on order for several major companies including Ebel watches (1990), Dom Ruinart Champagne (1992), Natixis Bank (2000) or Tiffany & Co. (2012, 2013) and has exhibited regularly in France, Switzerland and the US since 1990. He lives in Paris.

In 2007, the town of Bergerac in the Dordogne devoted a restrospective exhibition of 40 of his works at the Rectory Saint Jacques.

He is referenced in the Benezit Dictionary of Artists (Oxford University Press, 2010), in the Delarge dictionary of Arts (Gründ editions) (French: Dictionnaire des Arts Plastiques Modernes et Contemporains) as well as in the Swiss Who's Who.

Recent exhibitions

Selected solo exhibitions

Selected group exhibitions

Gallery

Notes and references

  1. ↑ Biography Jean Arcelin in Delarge dictionary Retrieved February 4, 2011
  2. ↑ Newspaper Jean Arcelin by Lydia Harambourg Retrieved February 4, 2011
  3. ↑ Newspaper Patrick Dennis, The Thinking Artist, Atlanta INTown, October 2013 issue, page 27 Retrieved February 20, 2014

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Bibliography

External links