FRAGMENTS: Jean-Marc Cerino

Jean-Marc Cerino collects old film photographs. He buys and assembles them. He compiles the basis of his research on the Internet via popular sites that sell all kinds of objects to tell a history of the 20th century through anonymous and modest fragments. 

Most of the subjects that the artist selects form an inverted portrait of mankind: the working class (from the everyday to union battles), industrial architecture in its distinct relationship to nature (factories, bridges, dams and constructions), the technological object linked to scientific research and the modernist quest for progress (satellites, military objects), as well as ethnologic and landscapes.. 

Extracted from an infinite ocean of images, both abandoned and forgotten, some are collected and as if being saved by the artist. Jean-Christophe Bailly writes: “The general idea is that of a rescue. It is a matter of bringing some of them [the photographs] back to the port. The port is the studio¹.”

From these source images, Jean-Marc Cerino creates glass paintings whose dimensions are closer to that of history paintings than the original photographic material. 

The usually protective glass becomes the support of the pictorial matter. Its transparency allows the artist to paint both sides, disassociating the image from the background. When the front hosts the motif, the back becomes a surface of experimentation on which the essences or products, such as turpentine or spray paint, slip and collide randomly. The background is thus created as a result of the motif, contrary to the tradition of painting in which the figure emerges from it.  

Appropriating these images by painting them, by changing their scale, by creating these dynamics of picture planes and backgrounds, of precise motifs and random games is a gesture that reactivates the image. The artist is particularly fond of the term “reprise” when he speaks of his work. It is a question of welcoming and carrying the orphaned image towards a renewed vision of the viewer– to give it a sense again. 

According to a political approach that aims to counter the “programmed obsolescence of images ²,” through the diversity and anonymity of their authors and the non-hierarchization of images, Jean-Marc Cerino’s glass paintings are those of a shared vision of the world.

¹ Jean-Christophe Bailly, La Reprise et l’Éveil. Essai sur l’œuvre de Jean-Marc Cerino, éditions Macula, 2021.

² Idem