Jean-Michel Fauquet. The Lost Hills

About

Each piece is an antechamber, a waiting area where we are patiently awaited. Our secret and personal artwork interpretation, our communication with it and confrontation with ourselves make of it a unique work since enriched and renewed by the multitude of possible decodings. Each piece is a projection of an elsewhere produced by one’s thought, imagination and desire. Therefore, the work is in opposition to concept and time because it urges us to embrace the present so that we are fully focused on observation and dialogue.

Jean-Michel Fauquet shows to everyone the artist’s great need to make forms happen. Their production due to succession of practices such as drawing, sculpture, painting and photography serves him to express what language cannot. The unusual forms (sculptures) confront with ordinary territories (landscapes) and sketch worlds (drawings) to invoke the off-screen. The essential is elsewhere. Jean-Michel Fauquet stops “working on a photography when it touches on reality”. And if once André Breton said “stop wanting me elsewhere”; Jean-Michel Fauquet, in his turn, constantly desires an elsewhere. Maybe, the ours. At least, the one where everyone can freely adjust his own access to the world.

As for his own world, Jean-Michel Fauquet creates it like an alternate reality in a real research laboratory. Creation is an endeavor. Involvement is total. Whether it is about shots in a darkroom or enlarging films on his own to enhance them after with oil and wax, or making sculptural forms from simple raw material, the studio becomes an arena of a fraternal and solitary struggle to make a form happen, a tension, a universe obeying the greatest artistic excellence. Since although the form construction or setup preparation are an integral part of creative process, the Jean-Michel’s universe does not end there but just begins.