Jean-Baptiste Besançon’s paintings do not bear any titles. This absence reveals a deliberate refusal to have two languages of a different nature cohabit, to add a thickness of meaning to what strides to awaken sensation. In front of his works, one senses a dialogue taking place that is far from words: we are as if caught up in the composition, seized by its chromatic depth, inhabited by its vibration. The painter thus succeeds, from the worlds that are his, to arouse the echo of ours.
- Elodie Kuhn
Absorption; The process of being fully taken in by a piece of art.
Paired with a momentary loss of time and often followed by an emotional reaction caused by a particular work, to be absorbed by an activity, in this case viewing a piece of art, requires a certain focus yet is simultaneously involuntary.
Utilising the nuance between shades of darkness or light, the works of Jean-Baptiste Besançon demand of their viewer a certain attention, engagement and lengthy observation. One must spend time with them, feel them, enter them.
In The Rothko Book (Harry N. Abrams, 2006) , McKinney highlights that Rothko’s desire for his darker works were that they “arrive slowly in one’s consciousness.” Adding that “he hoped to foster a more intense aesthetic experience by fostering a longer viewing experience. “
Painting on the floor, the notion of absorption takes on a second meaning in the case of Besançon, as the works themselves absorb elements from the surroundings in his studio, the paints themselves absorb into the canvas, and then into each other as he layers large, dynamic strokes over each other.
Absorption also describes the mental state of the artist as he creates, which gives credence to the concept of Flow, coined by Hungarian psychologist Csikszentmihalyi: “In essence, flow is characterized by complete absorption in what one does, resulting in a loss of one’s sense of space and time”. In this sense, the flow state of the artist in creating the work, creates the same state in its observer: one of pure absorption.
Jean-Baptiste Besançon lives and works in Bordeaux, where he was born in 1985. Introduced to plastic arts at a very young age, but self-taught in his artistic practice, he has been set on an abstract pictorial quest for many years.
Pierre Soulage summed up his abstract research in these short evocative words: “It is what I do that teaches me what I am looking for”. This same intuition is noticeable in Jean-Baptiste Besançon’s artistic approach. To watch him work is to understand that his compositions are not guided by preconceived ideas, they reveal themselves, discovered and elaborated in the course of their execution. In his studio, the artist works simultaneously on several canvases, laid horizontally and slightly raised from the ground. He moves in between them, led by the search for a specific colour or the call of a gesture. He traces, flattens, brushes, orientates the paint in either large flat areas or more concentrated strokes, without ever erasing any traces left by his tools.
