Jean-Philippe Deugnier Biography
The Franco-German artist Jean-Philippe Deugnier, who draws his inspiration from the Bauhaus, the Support-Surface movement, Edward Hopper and Vilhelm HammershØi, was an amateur for 25 years then turned professional after having worked for several years for the radiopharmaceuticals industry.
His work focuses on memory, resilience, cognition and emotions. He creates multifaceted, multi-discursive and evolving works that oscillate between art and science. His favorite themes were initially drawn from architecture, but over the years he shifted to portraiture, non-figurative subjects and semiology. He often includes curves and mathematical formulas in his images to emphasize the ambivalent nature of the relationship between materiality and emotion. He uses either his own clichés or images on glass plates, embracing simultaneous, successive or mixed color contrasts, image retention, intensifications, fades or interactions of colors, as well as unexpected readings that can occur. He uses high-quality industrial printing media, selected for their physical and optical properties, to create works that play with light and thus offer a perceptual experience of immersion in the image, an exploration of the idea of vision.
In his lenticular works, he combines between 2 and 8 images, in contrasting colors, so that both a single and multiple image emerges. The spectator’s movement in front of the image will create an alternation between one and the other, between one interpretation of the subject and another. The images alternately reveal and conceal certain details, changing from a dominant color to its complementary color. He also uses brushed aluminum, foil and Etchin paper or the piezography prints. He also does optical glass sculpture, and works on sandblasting and glass melting techniques.
He is a member of the international contemporary art movements SCIARCISM for his work on abstraction, TRANSFIGURING, for his work on plastic photography, and co-founder and theorist of the OPTICO-NARRATIVE movement, with his work on optical art and kinetics.
Artist Statement
I work on memory, resilience, cognition and emotions. It is a question, by a specific work on the image, especially on the color and its interpretation, to send a stimuli to the viewer, who takes the image for him, appropriates it and in a way, completes the image. story.
I have three creative directions:
- Optical art, in particularly the notion of afterimages and chromatic game.
- The non-figurative, inspired by the grammar of lyrical abstraction and codes of simple shapes and symbolic colors.
- Semiology, with work on the sign and writing. A work that once again combines color and its aesthetic resonance.
I often include curves or mathematical formulas in my images, thus highlighting the ambivalence between materialism and emotion. Passionate about photography, I use all of its techniques, both post-production and print media. I like his simplicity and his direct speech.\n I use either my own shots or images on glass plates, copyright-free (portraits, family photos, handwritten letters) dating from the XIX-XXth century, which I scan and rework in chromatic contrast, allowing a game optical and requiring increased observation of the image. So, I push the viewer to take an emotional and introspective journey.
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