Born on March 24, 1985, in Toulouse (France), Julien JACA is a painter who lives and works in Hossegor, on the Atlantic Coast in South-West France. In 2012, after four years at Toulouse School of Fine Arts, he quits it to dedicate himself entirely to his burgeoning career as an international tattoo artist. His many trips made him experience the physicality of traditional works of art and handicrafts—from which radiate a rare honesty, a pure spiritual and visual strength, he says. In 2018, a specific event leaves an indelible mark on his life, both as a human being and an artist, whose impact still lingers on in one of his first paintings called THE ONLY PICTURE I WILL EVER HAVE OF YOU. Ever since, JACA has been devoting himself fully to art and pictorial experimentation, embarking on the uninterrupted creative journey of a hundred or so paintings and drawings.
Raw, intuitive and disruptive, JACA’s hand has no specific plan. In his very own cathartic urge, paying no heed to aesthetic perfection, JACA revisits and hijacks outsider art. By colliding pop figures and naive illustrations with each other, the artist becomes a myth-maker. Using some archetypes for their immediate symbolism, he stages personal and familiar icons in almost photograph-like frontal poses. In these figurative pictures, the artist twirls 70’s US culture imagery, female nudes, and naive art’s primitivism around. Although he distances himself from tattooing, its presence remains pervasive, and he creates a mise en abyme of the tattoo flash: pigments of naked skin, ornaments on giant vases or earthenware pictograms on bikers’ jackets in the series THE SUN NEVER SETS ON ME.
Largely inspired by Afro-American artists from the post-slavery era like Sam Doyle and Williams L. Hawkins, as well as renowned French masters like Henri Matisse and Paul Gauguin, JACA does not limit himself to painting what he sees. He paints a profound portrait of his favorite people and objects to create iconic images against haloing electrical backgrounds—neither outdated, nor futuristic.
In JACA’s big theater, the Christ becomes a millennial wearing boxer shorts, Mary appears as a young tattooed mother, Mickey Mouse is on acid and flips the bird, Pin-Ups prostitute themselves at a discount, and bikers are no longer fond of Hell… The word-object is superimposed and traces its laconic shape on an old billboard, an adage that acts as a clue, if not a decoy… The media the artist uses—be they a canvas, some driftwood, a door frame or other reclaimed objects—are also tinged with his hijacking work.
Under the thick layers of paint, the sedimentation unique to JACA’s unconscious language also lays the grounds for his experimental process and introduces the part mishap plays in his work. Imperfections, overflowing, unfinished parts, covered up but still visible… His personal approach of pentimento takes form as he gets caught up, he mentions, by the layering of two images, through the vibration it created and the mystery it brought about in the narrative.
By initiating this deliberately explosive visual rhetoric, both familiar and enigmatic, insolent and serious, contemporary and ancestral, JACA offers the viewer the choice of a reading as protean and freed as his work.
By Timothée Chevalier