Lydia Harambourg

ENGLISH VERSION

JIA Juanli

Lydia Harambourg

JIA Juan Li’s intimism is rooted in her dual Chinese and French culture. This gives her a mastery over the pictorial techniques she employs in her art, imbued with mystery, and marked by a certain majesty. This demands a constant surpassing of the self and relying on demure emotions to extend the poetic reach of her paintings. All these qualities contribute to the eloquence of a style that conveys a decorative principle that can be generalised. A painter of emotions, she simplifies the forms she creates with lines that accentuate their structure and character. She maps the process to encourage our wanderings. A grave and melancholic language, suggesting dreams of a stylised life, emerge from her assimilation of both Song dynasty and Nabis painting (a lineage she does not deny). Despite her ability to share a poetry that comes from the soul, she nonetheless structures a seemingly commonplace world, transfigured by her skills in drawing and colouring. Her pictorial and atmospheric style is magical, permeated by an unreal light, neither dawn nor dusk, capable of introducing an unexpected sense of mystery into her well-designed and delightful naturalist subjects.

With her of portraits of women and representations of gardens, indoor scenes uninhabited or enlivened with characters, she shifts reality, attenuating its deforming aggressivity to create a sense of interiority. Deploying her carefully contained enthusiasm, she explores space following a mysterious internal adventure, open to introspection on everything her eyes encounter, close up or at a distance. Here, the characters furtively stand out in a sliding space that opens and closes with unidimensional views with no perspective. The elements representing space become compartments that make up the painting. The sobriety of the portraits that take on a hieratic quality in the frontal position, go hand in hand with a desire to elevate the face. These young women, with their codified hairstyles, dressed in rich traditional Qing dynasty costumes, plunge us into an oneiric world. Her painting is marked by a restrained palette that reinforces the feeling of an ideal, a sensation reinforced by the matt effect of the works. The coloured masses that create light and shapes compensate for the lack of volume, without resorting to values. The delicate harmonies of yellow ochre and earth, pale pink, whites and black, highlighted in emerald green, mauve and shades of blue, are employed to create a sense of ethereality. Everything is based on their subtle relationship to build up a feeling of unreal beings and objects.

Looking at JIA Juan Li’s paintings, it would not be incongruous to mention the Mallarmean poetic dream. Screens, bouquets of flowers, floral wall hangings, gathered in multiple spaces evoking a single plane, walled gardens, like those of the medieval age, suspend time, hesitating between reality and illusion. These are the decors dear to Maeterlinck, along with the reinterpreted reminders of the refined past of a scholarly society, secluded in imperial palaces. But the expressivity is stronger than the narrative. While her paintings are as gentle as those of her artist ancestors, she draws from her imagination filling every line with confidence. Between past and present, legacy and personal vision, JIA Juan Li seizes the pictorial field as if it were a highly textured fabric saturated with a golden light, to meditate on poetry, which she tells us is a daily reality, in her desire to enhance the expression of her intimate sensations.

Historian and Art Critic

Correspondent for the Académie des Beaux-Arts, Institut de France