philippe jaccard EN FR
Philippe Jaccard, a self-taught artist, was born in Switzerland in 1957. He left school after completing his primary school certificate. After various attempts at apprenticeship and small jobs (from washing dishes to baking), he joined (thanks to his mother's connections) the municipal police of Geneva. His only passion was painting. He sometimes abandoned his post to go back to his apartment and paint in uniform. At the age of 35, the state of great depression that has been his since adolescence worsened, leading the Swiss authorities to classify his case as one of permanent incapacity for work. Philippe Jaccard has been living since thanks to the allowances linked to his state of health, enabling him to devote himself entirely to painting.
There is nothing, or almost nothing, on the web about Philippe Jaccard. In forty years of painting, he has exhibited only six times. He has no computer and does not use the Internet or social networks. He could have been a monk, living away from the world and devoting himself to his painting. He still thinks about it: ‘’They have large spaces in the monasteries, I could paint there without being disturbed’’. He says that painting saved him from the psychiatric hospital.
Solitude is omnipresent in Philippe Jaccard’s work, a solitude that appears serene, soothing, stripped of any sophistication other than that of a sensuality, both deep and light, existential, of the pictorial act. ‘’With age, we strip ourselves of all things’’ he says. Return to childhood: the house, the tree, the silhouette. Represented as a child would, without ambiguity.
And always, an endless number of self-portraits. Why these self-portraits?
When asked this question, Philippe begins his response as he often does: ‘‘It’s like that, I don’t know…’’ Then he says: ‘’You get up, you get dressed, you walk: these are self-portraits. Everything you do in life is a self-portrait’’.
‘‘It's beautiful’’, says Philippe Jaccard every time he shows me one of his small paintings on A4 paper. ‘’It's beautiful’’, he keeps telling me with each new image offered to my gaze. ‘’It's beautiful’’... In front of certain self-portraits, he adds: ‘’It's moving’’. His way of expressing it is disarmingly sincere, like those simple sentences of early childhood that assign what is perceived as a state of fact and leave no room for comment.
‘’It's beautiful… I’ve been criticized for saying 'it's beautiful’ too often. But why not say what is?''
Since he discovered this technique of oil painting on A4 paper three or four years ago, Philippe Jaccard has been making several paintings a day. They are all disarmingly beautiful. The term fits in. It seems to be really about disarming the suffering deeply inscribed in him. Pacifying the pain. A ritual of redemption.
Hervé Perdriolle, Sept 2023
Confidences – 2023-2024
Notes I
During a trip to Paris to organize a meeting with Philippe Jaccard and an art brut dealer, I noticed that Philippe consumes little. At the café, he doesn’t order anything, he still has his bottle of water that once empty, he will fill up in preparation for the return. In fact, Philippe spends almost nothing on his daily life. However, a few weeks before, he commissioned me to buy him painting equipment in Brussels, at Schleiper, one of the best-stocked artists’ stores in Europe. Philippe Jaccard has always bought exclusively the best equipment (brushes, paper, oil paints) in fact, the most expensive. To this day (more than 40 years that I have been around artists) I have not known artists spending so much on their equipment. Moreover, while exhibiting and selling so little. "The quality of the paper, the canvas, the paints is important for the duration. It is also good for the people who buy them".
Paradox: Philippe Jaccard, for whom time, duration, longevity seem so important, attaches very relative importance to the future of his works, which he sometimes gives to the first person who comes along.
Notes II
The paintings on paper made on the morning of August 24, 2023 are supposed to represent dying people who always turn into fetuses. "In fact, it's because I've always painted. My work is fetal. I was told that I never came out of my mother's womb. Birth, death, life is like an endless circle. Maybe if God existed, he would have the shape of a circle".
Notes III
I remain captivated by the simplicity and spontaneity of Philippe Jaccard's A4 oils. Many great artists, from Klee to Picasso, have praised and tried to rediscover the astonishing freedom of children's paintings, of early childhood, before they were formatted by the beginning of an education. What interests Philippe Jaccard is not to be exhibited, to be recognized, to please, or even to sell (except to last, to live and to buy painting materials) but only and simply to do. In this, no doubt, he rediscovers this magic, this gratuity, of early childhood where it is only and simply a question of painting without any other goal or purpose.
Gratuity, this is perhaps the appropriate term to better approach and understand the prodigious presence of early childhood paintings. Expecting nothing in return, doing, drawing, painting. Gratuity as a synonym for spontaneity.
The child expects nothing in return for the first paintings he makes, aesthetics and resemblance have nothing to do there, perhaps just a form of amusement, surprise, wonder. It is clear that Philippe Jaccard is simply amazed by what he paints, a wonder sometimes tinged with fear when some of his paintings are particularly dark.
Notes IV
Philippe Jaccard has never read a book: "I can't concentrate to read a whole book". Some time later, he confided to me: "There are libraries everywhere. The world is full of books, millions of books... and the world is always the same, always so absurd, so senseless".
Notes V
Philippe Jaccard only paints what is close to him: his chair, his armchair, floral arrangements that the florist downstairs lends him daily, memories of landscapes, portraits of a few rare friends and an endless number of self-portraits. Philipe has tirelessly painted and drawn his chair, sometimes an armchair, probably the one he had in Dordogne. I point out to him that one of Van Gogh's most famous paintings represents his chair, which he also painted many times. He is surprised and tells me he is not aware of it, without any other comment than his astonishment.
Notes VI
Philippe Jaccard says he knows nothing about art history, and I believe him. Yet his works, almost all of his works, bear the stigmata of this history. His paintings are like shrouds that, placed on the body of history, are impregnated with an infinite number of pictorial evocations that we, seasoned viewers, feel, perceive, know. It is a strange feeling to see what he does not see, although we are looking at the same things, the same works.
Philippe Descola, an anthropologist whose thesis was supervised by Claude Lévi-Strauss, proposes a redefinition of the image, naturally of ethnographic objects but also of classical, modern and contemporary painting. For him, the image is not reduced to a simple representation, it does, it acts (in the manner of amulets, talismans or icons that are supposed to heal or protect).
In this sense, one can imagine that each painting by Philippe Jaccard takes on the virtues of a talisman.
Each painting seems to be for Philippe like the profane manifestation of an epiphany, a simple and obvious soothing, saving revelation.