‍Some artists are content to show, at a first level, what they see. Others assign themselves a different mission and impose upon themselves the difficult discipline of modestly indicating what lies beyond the gaze. This is the challenge Claude St-Jacques embraces in a uncompromising pictorial approach where the search for the self and the search for the other become intertwined.

‍Work after work, an unrelenting struggle of the angel unfolds against the confusion of what continuously emerges in this desperate search for self. For, despite all warnings, it is always the self that is at stake, even when the artist is in search of the other. Yet paradoxically, the reverse is equally true: it is always the other that is at stake when one is in search of the self.

‍And this search passes through the body — one’s own body — the body as conduit, as intermediary toward the soul. One cannot reach one without passing through the other. It is in this sense that the body is sometimes said to be the temple of the soul.

‍The elongation of the slender, stretched figure in a state of celebration of life, the expressionist character of the composition, and the textural effects on the canvas are not without recalling Giacometti, in whose work, though in a different register, torment and appeasement, scream and silence continually alternate.

‍Here lies precisely the authenticity of Claude St-Jacques’s approach: an inevitable passage through the mirror of Narcissus and a movement beyond it toward a more interior dimension of the self. The process presents itself as an unending quest that continues from one painting to the next, without end, without hope of ever reaching a final truth. And yet, work after work, a fragment of that same truth emerges, revealing itself with a modesty reinforced by dark colours.

‍Through the work, something wants to be said, something seeks to emerge. Or rather, something barely dares to speak, out of fear, modesty, or shame — hence the almost erased words that surface here and there like palimpsests where restraint and boldness merge.

‍When Flaubert declared, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi” (“Madame Bovary is me”), he clearly affirmed the multiple faces, the infinite variety of masks that the artist grants themselves the right to describe, reveal, and inhabit. It is also an affirmation of the polysemic, versatile nature of the being, which both composes and decomposes itself endlessly through its characters, through its many facets.

‍This seems to best describe the works of Claude St-Jacques, who, in the silence of her studio, pursues the dream, fixing the fleeting illusion of a truth that is always in the process of slipping away. A derisory quest, certainly, but at the same time an essential one — one that defines what it is to be human and best responds to the societal injunction: “Know thyself.”