JC Hyvert

Jean Charles Hyvert, where are you coming from?

According to him, and to paraphrase a contemporary “thinker”, he comes from Jupiter’s kitchen and he’ll be back there at tea time! His opinion is that nobody cares where he comes from and that his painting will not draw more attention if people knew what he is on about, where he is going, and the like…

He is an early self-taught painter who, still in a pram, happens to have met Picasso in Valauris. Neither school nor university were for him and he played the wag more than once. As he prides himself: he has a diploma in bed warming and a M.A. in local hearsay…. Which, of course, amounts to peanuts but looks nice on a C.V.!

He pleads guilty to gluing Mickey Mouse stickers in his school exercise books, despite his teachers’ fits! “Awful! I know!”, says he.

In other words: he does not like to speak about himself.

His sources of inspiration?

Not interesting for him in the least! It is only a starting point which is going to go astray anyway. He can start with a portrait and end up with a landscape… He does not decide. Painting does it for him, as well as composition, colours, etc. He lets them lead him to a point, enjoying the surprise after a specific stroke even if he tries to keep some sort of control over it. It’s all a question of keeping a balance as much as possible.

It is a kind of “an air battle” the outcome of which remains uncertain up to the last moment. Never take anything for granted. “A flash in my mind starts the game” he says. “Then everything is going to develop on the battle field. There are deadlocks, bitter victories and bloody defeats. The aim, however, is to survive with dignity and to end up with… something of interest but keeping some sort of mystery too, particularly for me. Come to think of it, tittles are booby traps! They lock us up in a set meaning. I must not have the answer. If I have it of believe I do and put it in a tittle, the enigma is unveiled before even looking at what is going on in the picture. In fact, if this happens, I just destroy the painting manu military and I start from scratch again!”

Do you apint with oil or water? Knife or brush?

“I paint like a Samouraï with despair and frantic rebellion of the setting sun. Like Pierre Dac said: “A Sar dines on oil exclusively”….

“I always brush against the bristle on a white canvas only drawing my knife to spread generously three layers of rainbow colours of good and luscious pigments. That’s a recipe of my grandmother’s…

In an artistic environment more and more inclined to facility, performance or photography, where does painting fit according to you?

“I am awfully sorry but I have to turn a bit damned boring here! Take a deep breath! You may know that painting started to be dead and buried in the sixties. As far as I am concerned, I see painting neither like a tool nor a mere medium. In my view, it is neither meant (only) to tell stories like in the good old days when photography did not exist nor to turn decorative (only).

I view painting as a missing link between the sacred object or the ritual image, if you want, and what is today called Art. I do not hold faith in a future for what is commonly named “contemporary art” and still less in the pathetic view that it amounts to using childish provocations: hugeness, blood, effluents, all sorts of body fluids and sex toys now or hardly any new other methods.

Neither do I believe in that faddish ideas, be they in context of not, with or without meaning, will be enough to satisfy public interest for generations to come. That might have been the case in past years but we’ll soon get tired of it.

It seems to me, on the contrary, that Art is meant to arouse enthusiasm and conscience via the sense of mystery it generates.

To cut a long story short, the emotional mystical tension in a work of art must prevail over what it represents. Only then will painting thrive as it has until now. It will go the distance as long as it remains true.”