Jean-Philippe Lagouarde is a self-taught artist from France. He has always been creative, drawing and painting since he was a child. When he moved to Paris, he felt overwhelmed by city life and felt the need to reconnect with nature. He started his artistic journey in a small studio he built in his Paris apartment.
His work is characterized by a slow, repetitive, and precise technique, with unpredictable results. He uses a box cutter to slice thousands of thin strips of dyed blotting paper and adheres them contiguously on a frame. By choosing this medium of the past, he opts for a base that serves primarily to hold an overflow of ink.
The blotting paper, an unstable and fragile medium, is thus ennobled. It gives a dynamic nature to each of his works, affected by light, air, and time. The same meditative path, close to asceticism, gives birth to a different work each time. These thousands of strips of paper are like the steps climbed on a mountain to reach a summit. Their number, which varies, gives the title to each work and measures the path taken by the artist, like a performance.
© All photos by Jean-Philippe Lagouarde
