Claude St-Jacques
Painter
BODY AND WOMAN DOSSIER
CLAUDE ST-JACQUES AND THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL IMAGE
Vie des arts , no 165, Hedwidge Asselin
Fully in keeping with the spirit of modernity — and to the delight of our eyes — Claude St-Jacques pours herself, body and colour, onto the canvas, as her recent works in the Corpus series attest.
Claude St-Jacques belongs to those creators who seek their identity through lived experience, privileging the subconscious and often prompting a re-evaluation of chance and destiny. For her, technical mastery is less important than the way of being; her art ceases to question itself in order to serve a reality external to it. Painting becomes a field of intuitive realization, a practice in which unknown relationships are inscribed between the artist, the world, and others.
The artist lives and comes into being through her images. Her language is highly personal, even if her subjects or style do not immediately single her out. To the hurried viewer, she might even appear to extend what has traditionally been categorized under expressionism, with creativity and subjectivity at the core of her practice.
Her works are linked to everyday, personal events. They form the pages of a kind of intimate journal, bearing witness to a receptivity that art records in the distance separating the real from the individual.
This artist pays little attention to the reactions of others. She seeks to see in a way that escapes the physical limits of the eye; she reads the world with an unguarded gaze, showing equal distrust for photomechanical effects and for culturally imposed codes of representation. The images she traces are so many disclosures, confessions that would not take place outside the circumstances of art.
AT THE HEART OF THE WORK
To build oneself within the work, to inscribe one’s relationships with others in it while extending oneself completely through it, is not an entirely new experience, yet it remains compelling, for the conditions of representation rely on what eludes obvious perception.
Concerned with everything that moves and transforms according to laws invisible to the naked eye, the artist lays bare her desires and everything that escapes the programming of reason. Her search for identity compels her to question her language whenever she seeks to understand why it works rather than how it works.
It is a matter of becoming aware of what compels the painter to construct, like nature itself, using the means of her art. Moving from the outside toward the inside, the artist inscribes, by exposing her doubts, what has been lost, trusting only her intuition. Such a search returns to the realm of secrecy and intimacy.
In the Corpus series, the living model is taken into account and regarded as though it had never been seen before — with spontaneity, in the course of an improvised reading, an unexpected encounter.
Placing herself at the center of the work, Claude St-Jacques seeks unity between body and mind, within an experience sufficiently indeterminate for the unknown to emerge, and sufficiently involuntary for the image of desire to take hold.
