JEAN MIOTTE: RETURN TO CHINA

Almine Rech Shanghai is pleased to announce "Return to China”, Jean Miotte's second solo exhibition with the gallery.

January 10 - March 15, 2025

His artistic impulse contained an inherent anxiety from the acknowledged risk of avoiding the pitfalls of triviality and indulgence. He had to face the possible failure of achieving a painting whose difficulties he strove to resolve through pictorial developments. 

Jean Miotte’s art is demanding. He made art from a need to paint and his lack of training (except for his occasional time spent in the open art academies of Montparnasse) did not deter him. Miotte wanted to create images where “the tension toward form is a sign.” His fleeting influences (Matisse, Robert Delaunay, artists of the Quattrocento discovered during a trip to Italy, and Flemish painters) became part of his image-producing imagination in his own personal artistic journey. 

Gesture was primary, as the expression of an existential experience. It led him to a lyricism that was inseparable from a philosophical and spiritual lived experience and from a musical and choreographic world that was familiar to the artist. The creation of arcane signs and their thought-out rhythm called for the simultaneous use of the brush, the palette knife, and the painting knife. The evocative power of a world determined by opposing forces underpins what is truly a metaphysics of the image. Through the vitality, transparency, and richness of the paint, the visual field developed the personal value of the colors within a palette emphasizing white.  

Jean Miotte’s style transcends the life of forms in a metamorphosis combining grandeur and intimacy, seriousness and exuberance. With color the seduction is complete. It erases any concern. It makes us complicit in the work by opening a dialogue that can no longer be interrupted.