JACQUES SOISSON 1928/2012

Oil on canvas 116x89cm dated 1974.

Jacques Soisson studied at the École supérieure des beaux-arts in Toulouse, then at the École des Beaux-arts in Montpellier. From 1966 to 1978, he was a child psychotherapist.
In 1969, he was a member of the Société d’art brut created by Jean Dubuffet.
He is recognized for his fantastically inspired paintings with contrasting colors called “Mexican” but also totemic characters characterized by an exacerbated personality.
THEY SAID ;

“You seem to me to have been like Moses - all things considered - invested with a mission: to revive for our time the very ancient theogony of a universe where God still left room for the gods... That a Dubuffet had you so soon noticed and encouraged does not mean that your painting has any connection with “Art Brut”. On the contrary, if your inspiration owes everything to instinct, its realization is the work of an artist, a complete visual artist. This is a very elaborate painting, often monumental, always dominated and balanced…” Georges Moos
“Jacques Soisson appears to me as a machinist of the imagination. Its domain is the theater of operations of the unconscious, where nocturnal intrigues come and go... Things are always obvious. Always violent, colors, whether they are translated at their maximum brilliance or in their dull opacity…” (Robert Abirached)
“With the perfect mastery of his drawing, his acute sense of monumental composition, his “Mexican” palette, his fantastic inspiration, Soisson is at the center of the great truth of painting which perhaps comes to us from the shores of the worlds forgotten which only poets, children and painters remember. Soisson’s work embodies this living trinity. » (André Parinaud)
“I have always seen and felt Jacques Soisson as a big child whose eyes marvel at the adventure of the world. Far from simply observing, counting, photographing, he constantly asks himself why a stick is a stick, a cloud a cloud, a man a man. In short, why the universe is there. Which is obviously the only way to paint, that is to say, to create. »(Joseph Delteil)
“Jacques Soisson did not invent painting or the joy of painting... But how funny? Funny thing, one would say. These monsters with faces and claws, these pedaling characters, these cabaret athletes, these totem kings like so many crazy lovers - which Antinèa? - frozen in their colorful strips or their dazzling shreds..." (Jacques Berne)
“His paintings are explosions of strong, tonic colors... The mind has deconstructed the figurative image, the hand has traced black arabesques which give the rhythm, the color is coiled in these interstices and the line has multiplied depending on the canvas, it becomes a link between darkness and light, between oblivion and memory... For me, Jacques Soisson's painting is the luminous balance to torments which are less so. Jacques Soisson has this magical power to paint as much with his soul as with his brushes. » (Evelyne Lagache)
“Its layout is complex, we don't know where to enter it, like a puzzle whose elements would undoubtedly continue to be missing. There must be a breadcrumb trail? Soisson cannot explain. He has long abandoned the vein that would have been enough to return him to the sad fate of fame. » (Hugues Bachelot

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