Jean Arcelin

Who is Jean Arcelin?

Jean Arcelin is a French and Swiss painter born in Paris in June 1962. He studied at Charpentier, a licensed art history school at the Sorbonne, where he developed an interest in seventeenth and eighteenth century painting. His paintings incorporate elements of false realism and figurative art, as well as some remote elements of Baroque.

Arcelin uses references, like Baroque, in order to create an effect, striving to make each painting a fully-fledged world where viewers can travel and find ideas. The spaces in the paintings are alive and are executed with rapid and spontaneous gesture. Landscapes edge with the urban sea, and combine with portraitist gesture. He takes corners of Paris, cafe chairs piled up in the angle of view of a monument, or the dressing room of a theatre, and portrays them empty of all human presence. His luminous depictions of interiors or landscapes are so charged that you can sense the personalities that inhabit the rooms or spaces, though they are absent.

The seascapes summon up the emotive works of J.M.W. Turner, while the interiors and an Italianate fountain scream John Singer Sargent. An Arcelin painting can be a false realistic: it is figurative without becoming complex.