Christian JEQUEL, the renowned contemporary French painter, is a self-taught talent who single-handedly originated the technique of palette-knife painting. The most unique aspect of his work is motion. When he was still a child, he struggled to express the motions – the “third dimension” in his works – of the things and people he found around him. Mr Jequel has spent his whole life striving to represent motion. The motion of galloping horses, of people at work, of hands playing musical instruments, or of clouds over the sea. This motion makes an extraordinarily powerful visual impact on those who view his work.
When he was 25, Jequel began to use the palette knife to paint; 45 years of intense work enable him not to sketch out his work on the canvas but to create directly on the canvas with the palette knife. In order to fully express this motion that he has pursued all his life, Mr Jequel's painting technique has become faster and faster, as he strives to create the perfect line with one quick stroke of the palette knife. “When I want to depict someone bending over to pick something up, I try to finish it in the time it would take for the person to complete the move.” To a visiting reporter from a local Marseilles magazine, Pleins Feux Marseille , Mr Jequel declared, “Using the palette knife to paint lets me more freely express a sense of motion.” The four cardinal principles of palette-knife painting are:
1. Only by using the palette knife can you fully express a sense of motion.
2. By first mixing the paint on the knife and using the knife to apply the paint thickly to the canvas, you convey a very strong tactile sense.
3. With each stroke of the knife, you want to express a subject's form as well as its internal significance: shadow, light, muscle, wrinkles, etc.
4. Each knife stroke needs to harmonise with the colours already on the canvas and encompass the surroundings of the subject.
Completely self-taught, Mr Jequel has never attended an art school, yet he has never stopped studying; in his view, the works of painters long dead and still living, ancient and contemporary, famous and unknown all have aspects worthy of study. Jequel's paintings come from life and reflect life. Many of his works depict actual village life and rural scenery in southern France. All of his works come from his own personal experiences.
Mr Jequel's paintings are nimble and bright, with fresh colours and a strong sense of motion. This is closely related to his use of the knife to paint; when a paintbrush is used, only about half the painting is light, while the other half consists of lines and is dark and murkey. With the palette knife, the portion of light reaches 75%.
More than half a century of life experience and artistic achievement, as well as one-man shows around the world, have made Mr Jequel a truly international painter. As Old China, with its splendid millennial civilization, strides rapidly into the future, the outstanding works of contemporary Chinese painters have already come to France during the Sino-French Year of Culture, and Mr Jequel is eager to make use of this channel to develop all types of cultural exchange and cooperation with China's artists and collectors and make a joint contribution to this Sino-French cultural exchange.
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