L’Imagier du vivant / Exhibition from September 16 to October 31, 2021
Opening on Thursday, September 16 from 6 pm
“In my childhood home grew cabbages, green beans, carrots, potatoes, and a few fruit trees. At the end of the garden was a rabbit hutch, which I approached with fear, surprised by their sudden gallops. Flowers grew around the well (…) I now live in Paris, but I still carry all those vivid sensations of my childhood with me, and I like to bring them back to life in my paintings.“
At the beginning of Martin Jarrie was a landscape, that of the Sèvre valley in which flows that important tributary of the Loire that is the Sèvre Nantaise. From the back of his parents’ garden, he could not only see the Saint Martin farm, but also make out La Jarrie on the other bank, where he spent his early years. A sufficiently strong attachment to this childhood land for Martin Jarrie to choose the names of these places as his artist pseudonyms.
“One is of one’s childhood as one is of a country…”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
It’s also the ever-present memory of the nature of his early years, which rubs shoulders with Italian primitives, art brut, 18th-century anatomical engravings, the American painter Robert Zakanitch, surrealism and Manufrance catalogs, among the great muses of the French illustrator and painter and gives his work a unique cachet.
A small patch of garden, near the rabbit hutch, is transformed into a cornucopia in “ L’Imagier du vivant ” to spread fruit, vegetables and animals before our dazzled eyes as weary city dwellers. A whole universe dreamed up in just a few square metres…
Martin Jarrie is represented by Adoráble ART+DESIGN gallery in The Hague, Netherlands.
In 1997, he won the grand prize at the Bratislava International Illustration Biennial for two albums. In 2002, “Au bout du compte” (text by Régis Lejonc) was awarded the Baobab (best album prize) at Montreuil.
“Hyacinthe et Rose” (text by François Morel, 2011) and his book “Rêveur de cartes” (2013) won a Special Mention at the Bologna International Children’s Book Fair.
Since 2007, his paintings can be seen at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, rue des Archives in Paris. His work has been exhibited in Japan and Portugal, where a major exhibition was dedicated to him in 2005.
His work has also been shown in retrospectivesat the Musée de l’Illustration in Moulin in 2007 and at the Electricity Museum in Lisbon in 2012.
Please note, a health pass is required to access the exhibition opening.