On View
Not on viewObject number1970/1.27
Portrait of Laure
Artist
Alain Jacquet
(French, 1939-2008)
Date1968-1969
Mediumetching
Dimensionsimage: 18 13/16 × 12 3/16 in. (47.8 × 31 cm)
sheet: 29 9/16 in. × 22 in. (75.1 × 55.9 cm)
mat: 30 × 24 in. (76.2 × 61 cm)
sheet: 29 9/16 in. × 22 in. (75.1 × 55.9 cm)
mat: 30 × 24 in. (76.2 × 61 cm)
Credit LineDirector's Fund
Exhibition HistoryRound and Round, Ethel Denton Groos Gallery, November 4, 2017 - March 4, 2018
"L'esprit: Exploring Wit and Beauty in French Prints," works from the KIA permanent collection (June 15 - August 25, 2019).Label TextJacquet’s prints begin with photographs—in this case, a picture of his friend Laure Gemajnet. The photograph was taken in New York’s Chelsea Hotel, where the French artist lived and met icons of American Pop Art: Warhol, Rauschenberg, and Lichtenstein. Alain Jacquet also enjoyed blurring the boundaries between fine art and popular culture. Like Lichtenstein, he sometimes co-opted the newspaper industry’s Ben-Day dots.
However, Jacquet became more interested how these mechanical processes rely upon optical blending within to the eye to produce an image—
a phenomenon explored decades earlier by French Impressionist and Pointillist artists. In this print, Jacquet manipulates printed color separations in an over-all bulls-eye pattern, rather than with individual, colored dots. He pushes the image to the threshold of legibility.
My work is all about making images disappear. It’s a visual, formal thing—there’s no deep philosophy behind it and I’m not commenting on photo-journalism. I’m fascinated by the way a picture can break down into the tiniest abstract elements close up, then reappear as a pictorial image.
