Dream tiger n°4
The idea of a painting “in CinemaScope” is spread out in the large electric-blue paintings by Jacques Monory. This aesthetic is confirmed with power in Dream Tiger n°4, the composition of which borrows both the widened form of a cinema screen and a contact sheet, with its succession of images. “All my works are ends of film rolls of film noirs that are more or less dipped in a monochrome blue and, for a time, in an elementary Technicolor”. The tigers share the poster with gangsters, haunting Monory’s works. Here, the power of the animal and its potential ferocity appear as if activated by the confined universe that constrains it. The smooth, cold, images staged by the artist make incomparable universes collide… the muted violence of the big cat in a cage crashes into the immaculate vastness of the ice floe for example.
Jacques Monory (1924-2018)
After training as a painter-decorator at the Paris School of the Arts, he worked for the art publisher Robert Delpire, where he discovered photography. In the 1960s, he became one of the pioneers of the narrative figuration movement, which was characterised by returning to figuration, as a reaction to abstract art, and far from American Pop Art. He was passionate about film, and also drew on the art of comic strips and photography to feed his painting.
