Jean Nipon

M+B is pleased to present Are You Better off Alone?, an exhibition of new works by Jean Nipon. This is the artist's first solo show with the gallery.

Post-modernity is now an old friend of ours, but yet it still pretty much defines the way we ingest and digest all art and media. Now that it has inhabited our world and been around for five decades, has it become the norm? Is it de facto the regular frame within which we see, read, and listen to things around us, in front of us, behind and ahead of us? This is a question Jean Nipon might or might not have a definite answer to, but at least he tries to produce something about it, to create pieces made into this particular post-modern set-up and mind-scape, and maybe will end up getting away with it.

A former Beaux-Arts student born in the late seventies, Paris-based Nipon spent most of his adult life being a musician (a drummer, then an electronic producer) and a DJ. Yet, he never really forgot his visual background and some years ago spontaneously reconnected with drawing. A huge painting buff, Jean roamed virtually every online museum to download HD pics of his favorite works, but didn’t have the kind of money to afford, say, a drawing by Ingres, a Jean Dupas painting or portrait by Alexander Roslin. So he started to draw the stuff he most revered, with color pencils only. After a while, he decided to fashion more personal pieces, first as low-key, derivative tributes to his masters, then injecting inspirations from his own multiple topics of fascination – horror movies, children’s books, French actresses, ruins, smooth jazz, and hardcore among many other fields.

Nipon never properly thought of the path he was taking and has always been uninterested in his own personal intentions: he’s mostly focused on the craft and the universal language it allows him to use, bypassing the notion of style as the expression of a self. To him, art can’t be about someone’s randomly specific vision of things. It should be about recognizable items everyone understands the same way, that should be implemented by the artist in his/her work with no emotional input but a rational one.

Color pencils don’t make things easier, but they help him being even more remote from any type of self-polarized worldview. Especially when the pencils he favors are now out-of-stock and only findable (and often outrageously expensive) on eBay.

Nipon dedicated these last five or six years to the painstaking conception of three dozen drawings and spent his days and nights working and researching. The result is a series of gorgeous, mesmerizing pictures, but beauty is not exactly what he’s aiming for. Nipon says he doesn’t want to just recreate the sublime paintings of yesteryear, and he’s definitely not into “remixing” them. He feels the language he’s using (skies, faces, furniture, unfinished buildings) is better understood as theory than narrative; he’s more into connecting thoughts and affects, or building atmospheres, than into proper storytelling. The sensuous experience he’s conjuring in his pictures are not his own, yet it’s not exactly anonymous – more like tiny fumes of aura blended into one another to create something we don’t know specifically but we feel attracted to.

The sheer prettiness and harmony of its drawings is sometimes so overloaded with (literally) iconic data that the viewer can feel almost nauseous contemplating it. Their use value is almost too much, too saturated, making its exchange value possibly irrelevant. As Giorgio Agamben wrote on Baudelaire’s modernity in art, these works are yearning for their own self-destruction, yet just for a brief moment they have to be shown, just to make sure they’ll disappear.

Could this be a very late version of Romanticism? A selfless taste for forms originally made to tell stories, then mutated by history into estranged visual artifacts?

Jean Nipon’s work inhabits that space between post-modernity’s “everything’s mid-brow” mindset and the inner, almost spiritual belief a Eurodance hit can move you and teach you things the same way a Bach cantata can. Anything can be deeply enjoyable as long as you find the right capitalistic context to enjoy it. Genuine voices will remain unheard, but artists will keep on working on their own. Still, Alice Deejay’s question remains: Are you better off alone?

"Do you think you're better off alone?

Do you think you're better off alone?

Do you think you're better off alone?

Do you think you're better off alone?

Talk to me, ooh-ooh, talk to me

Talk to me, ooh-ooh, talk to me

Do you think you're better off alone?

Do you think you're better off alone?

Do you think you're better off alone?

Do you think you're better off alone?

Do you think you're better off alone?

Do you think you're better off alone?

Talk to me, ooh-ooh, talk to me

Talk to me, ooh-ooh, talk to me

Talk to me"

—Alice Deejay

Jean Nipon (b. 1977 in Périgueux, France) is a French artist who graduated in 2000 from les Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux. After a career as an internationally acclaimed musician, he made the pivotal change to dedicate himself exclusively to drawing. Recent solo exhibitions include Souvenir d’une aura, Pact, Paris, France and Jean Nipon - Dessins, Galerie Hubert Duchemin, Paris, France. He has been featured in group exhibitions at Grimm Gallery, London, UK; Galerie Pact, Paris, France; and Confort Mental, Paris, France. Nipon lives and works in Paris, France.