EFFONDREMENT ET TREMBLEMENTS: Jean-Marc Cerino

From Trois ruines aux animaux, Guernica, Varsovie et Dresde (2012), to Théâtre de la Porte-Saint-Martin incendié, 1871 (2024) and his recent participation in the “Forme de la ruine” exhibition at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon in 2023-2024, the representation of ruin runs through Jean-Marc Cerino’s work. The “ruined“ and the “collapsed” are the major axes of his method of painting on and under glass, which Jean-Christophe Bailly sees as “the chance for an entirely new history of painting”. 

This notion of collapse runs through this profoundly melancholic work, part of a waking look at the world and our present, of the Western world. Indeed, one might ask whether the West has not always been under the spell of collapse. The Latin origin of the word, linked to the solar course, is that of fall: occidere, to fall. In return, the West has always had to be on the side of “rising”, of taking action.

If trembling is a movement, it is also the qualification of a gesture, a trace, even an effect. Jean-Marc Cerino’s paintings can seem to tremble, as if crossed by a slight flicker. This perception stems from the dissociation between the photographic image on the front side of the glass and the pure paint background on the reverse. The thickness of the glass creates a visual gap between these two pictorial gestures, figurative on the front and abstract on the back. This gap produces a splitting, a stuttering, accentuated by the shadow cast by the image on its background.
 

The proposed analogy between stuttering and trembling allows us to think of the latter as a singular, fragile, groping way of saying and recording something of the world.