Jacques Monory (1924)
France

"Born in 1924 in Paris and died in 2018 in Paris

Jacques Monory is one of the main representatives of Narrative Figuration, which, although it never proclaimed itself as a movement, nevertheless brought together a group of artists united around a singular vision of painting. His work has been exhibited in countless galleries and institutions in Europe, starting, for the latter, with the ARC Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris and the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 1971, then the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1972), the Louisiana Museum in Humlebæk in Denmark (1975), the Kunsthalle in Hamburg (1977).
In 2005, it was with Jacques Monory and the retrospective exhibition Détour. Episode 1 that the MAC VAL, Contemporary Art Museum of Val-de-Marne, opens its doors to the public in Vitry-sur-Seine.
Jacques Monory was also the subject of numerous documentary films from the 1960s and 70s.

Before becoming an active member of Figuration Narrative in 1962, he trained in a school of applied arts and learned the trades of graphic designer, fresco artist, painter and decorator. He then worked for ten years with the art publisher Robert Delpire who provided him with a wealth of photographic documents, which would greatly influence his approach to painting. It was then in 1964, with the famous exhibition Daily Mythologies presented at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, that the artists of Narrative Figuration (Bernard Rancillac, Hervé Télémaque, Peter Klasen, Öyvind Fahlström in particular) revealed themselves to eyes of the general public. They create a painting that intends to challenge the hegemony of Pop Art by proposing a new reflection on the contemporary image and the different channels that irrigate it such as advertising, comics and of course cinema. Jacques Monory then establishes the tenets of a work which never ceases to play on the porosity of the borders between fiction, autobiography and contemporary history.

Through games of associations and collages of images, Monory produces shattered and fragmentary visions of reality whose atmosphere borrows both from the figurative power of cinema and from the violence of the noir novel. Sometimes in technicolor but more often on a monochrome blue background, Jacques Monory composes his paintings as one would commit a crime in the best detective film: coldly, methodically, seeking to make the touch invisible.
His work is organized according to series, the most famous remaining that of the Murders of 1968-1969, where, within a clinical space, he delivers a sequenced and multiplied vision of his own fall.
Deeply existentialist, his painting deals with life and death, solitude (New York series, in 1971) and waiting, and the artist defines himself as a “lost romantic”. Omnipresent, the color blue creates a dreamlike and melancholic filter which ends up covering the “photo novel” of a doomed world.
In this cinematographic vein, which lingers on urban loneliness and its nocturnal imagination, Monory's work is sometimes reminiscent of that of Edward Hopper - a painter to whom he paid homage with an oil on canvas in 1971."

(Source, website, Contemporary Art Institute of Villeurbanne)