JEAN MIOTTE

His approach tends to two extremes, on the one hand a writing at the height of thought and sensation, and jointly and exuberant spontaneity until the loss of oneself, in a ZEN spirit. This vocation of the void was manifested especially from 1962 on, following regular stays in New York where he bonds with Rothko and Motherwell. Miotte gives praise to white that has become light, and which ‘radiates and erases limits’, he says. The fluid space is cut across by vigorous flat areas that extend into hemmed waves, torn to shreds in a spatial labyrinth whose complacent pitfalls it suppresses.

His painting shows a return to polychromy with a palette of pure tones, favouring the primaries whose sounds he exploits. The use of brushes, spatulas, knives, allows the effervescence of a cursive graphic design in colours with rich, vibrant, and sharp accents for a moving universe governed by contradictory and dual forces. A dissemination appeared in the seventies and eighties, for a new cycle centred on metamorphosis. Between violence and refinement, density and transparency, fervour and revolt, Jean Miotte’s painting achieves the quivering balance of life. The rhythmic arabesque of its forms is an echo of the dance that inspires it. The unity of his language is realised in this informal lyricism which reaches a pictorial plenitude by managing to give substance to his sensations of light, to make an indefinable sacred coincide in the energy of living.

Jean Miotte, who exhibited in Paris with Joan Mitchell, Riopelle, and Sam Francis, transcends a singular and immediately recognisable body of work.

Courtesy Almine Rech