During the presentation of the Distinction Jacqueline Oyex 2013 to François Burland (on 10 September 2013 at 18:00 at the Collection de l'Art Brut), works by Jacqueline Oyex and François Burland, two artists belonging to the Neuve Invention collection, will be displayed at the Collection de l'Art Brut from 3 to 29 September.
Two films,
Les poyas burlesques de François Burland,by Philippe Lespinasse and Fabrice Ferrari (2012, 35’) and
Jacqueline Oyex,by Francis Reusser (2011, 21’) will be shown continuously in the exhibition space.
François Burland
Born in 1958 in Lausanne, self‑taught, François Burland began painting at the age of 17. His first large compositions were set in an imaginary register, inspired by mythology, shamanism, children’s tales and chivalric stories. But he quickly felt the need to confront his intimate exoticism with reality. He has frequently traveled to the Tuareg of the Sahara, not as a tourist of course, but to share in their nomadic life, making real friends there. This forced him to correct his romantic clichés, to incorporate 4x4s, mobile phones and Kalashnikovs alongside dromedary caravans and the magic of sorcerers.
François Burland travels in all dimensions, those of space, time, bodily intimacy, mental depths. He unexpectedly switches from one series to another, devising a unique technique for each: epic drawings made in neocross on massive wrapping paper, precious miniatures opening onto the infinite, nocturnal photographs on soot backgrounds, or toys made from recovered materials.
The recent series of Poyas paradoxically presents itself as a counter‑perspective on an unexpected folklore of ours: François is back, he arrives, still a traveler, into a schizophrenic Switzerland that tries, though imperfectly, to reconcile its ancestral and hyper‑contemporary myths. Unfazed cows parade through a landscape studded with symbols that allude to Stalinism, Islamism, space conquest, advertising, the internet, the chocolate industry, tax havens, etc.: an unlikely pasture that becomes, in the light of astonishment, humor, philosophy, provocation – of art, in a word.
(Michel Thévoz)
Jacqueline Oyex (1931-2006)
Born in Lausanne in 1931 to a wealthy family, Jacqueline Oyex was an over‑protected child, perhaps because of the death of her twin brother a few days after his birth. Placed in a state of solitude and constant convalescence, she spent long hours drawing. She had a diligent education and entered the Lausanne School of Fine Arts in 1951. Her teachers, notably painter Marcel Poncet and sculptor Casimir Reymond, regarded her as a talented student who required respect for her independence. After a year’s stay in Paris, 1954-55, cut short by illness, she returned to Lausanne to her parents. In 1965 she joined the engravers group L’Epreuve, founded by Albert‑Edgar Yersin. In 1957 Casimir Reymond welcomed her into his workshop in Lutry. She devoted an exalted, platonic love to him, which only intensified after his death in 1969, which she could not accept. She then returned to live with her mother, in a state of heightened introversion and anxiety. Fitting depressive episodes led to her hospitalization in 1982, and from 1984 she was placed in a medically managed home until her death in 2006.
Jacqueline Oyex seems to have truly transferred her failing identity into her graphic and pictorial creation. It is mainly through her engraved work that she became known, with dreamlike, anxious compositions populated by hierarchical faces that pin the viewer, silhouetted by an extraordinarily concise line. Opposite this minimalist linearity, and perhaps as a result of a dramatic oscillation between fullness and emptiness, the paintings, still to be discovered, are characterized by dramatic matter, to the point of drowning forms in the thickness of the paste. If one were to trace an ancestry, it would be toward Soutine and Marcel Poncet. The last years were marked by an aesthetic of disappearance: the compositions shrink until they evaporate, expressing the artist’s social withdrawal and foreshadowing her own death.
Around 1980 the artist had already donated to the Collection de l'Art Brut, which she was deeply interested in, a series of engravings that were classified in the Neuve Invention collection.
La fondation Jacqueline Oyex
The Jacqueline Oyex Foundation, located at rue Etraz 4, CH‑1003 Lausanne, was created on 20 April 2007 at the initiative of Ms. Katia Horber Papazian, niece of the artist, who presides over the foundation. Owner of most of the canvases, the whole engraved oeuvre, plates, drawings and documents, the foundation has set as its objective the preservation, dissemination and promotion of Jacqueline Oyex’s work to museums and the public. Thus it initiated the 2011 retrospective at the Musée de Pully, the publication that same year of a monograph by Michel Thévoz, and the website www.jacquelineoyex.ch.
