Jacques Monory
© Philipp Hugues Bonan
“I have always thought that the world is cruel and I want to represent it as such. At the same time as this violence, the blue becomes a plaque that puts distance. "
© Philipp Hugues Bonan
Jacques Monory was born in Paris on June 25, 1934, and died in the same city on October 17, 2018. He began his career in art by training as a graphic designer, painter, fresco artist and decorator in a school of applied arts . Following his studies, he worked for 10 years at the art publisher Robert Delpire: he was then confronted with the worlds of artistic direction and photographic documents. These will influence him largely in his plastic practice.
He thus develops the “Monory vision”, composed of real images from a modern and cinematographic culture, punctuated, for the most part, by violence of all kinds. With this vision, Jacques Monory opens a new dimension of storytelling, at the dawn of the 1960s, when the Narrative Figuration movement emerges. In 1962, he then became one of the active members of this movement which advocated, among other things, the representation of current events. Jacques Monory's figurative style is marginal: through his monochrome scenes of various facts, death and catastrophes, he expresses the madness of the world, in his own way. Monory harmoniously mixes several categories of art in his work: framing accidents result from his knowledge in the fields of photography and cinema, his monochromes often blue, pink or yellow, result from his talent as a painter. Thus, this mixture of processes brings coldness and force of reality to his productions, revealing his obsessive imagination. Monory's works are not only canvases, but also a film in themselves: they open windows on crime scenes and various facts among others; they are allegories of the contemporary world.
