Jacques Sultana
Peintre
“Jacques was an outcast.
Despite an address in the 16th arrondissement, he lived in a two-bedroom loft that served as his apartment and studio.
As a young man cast out by his family because of his homosexuality, he found refuge in this eagle’s nest that he never left, an agreed-upon address that was the last link with his bourgeois upbringing.
From this family trauma he retained a certain aggressiveness for fear of being attacked; the slightest remark about one of his paintings could upset him, and I later learned that he reproduced this pattern of rupture, even with his friends.
I discovered Jacques’ work when a collector asked for my expertise.
Disturbed by the hyperrealism of his paintings, he feared a technical trickery akin to retouched photography.
Breathless after climbing the seven flights of stairs, I entered the painter’s world: an accumulation of portraits of men.
Every wall was covered with them, piles piled up on the red carpeted floor.
(…) ” Pierre Passebon (excerpt from the book Jacques Sultana, ed. Pierre Passebon, 2022) Jacques Sultana mainly depicts young men alone, most often naked, in all their erotic and sexual power.
Although there is only one body on the canvas, all his paintings respond to an external gaze.
– First that of the painter, then that of the viewer – who directs the composition as much as the model’s attitude.
In this way, Jacques Sultana annihilates the ambiguity of a hackneyed game of hide-and-seek between exhibitionism and voyeurism, preferring instead to stage a direct, frontal relationship between a naked body fully offered up and the viewer who is detailing it, shaping it for his own enjoyment.
The question of physical veracity is irrelevant here(…).
For his search seems to lie elsewhere, in the instant of a body that knows it has been seen and a hand that touches it with its brush.
(…) Of course, these images retain a kind of carnal fascination, but something else slips into them, the solar radiance of youth rubbing shoulders with the melancholy of a lost paradise.
Jean-Pierre Blanc, General Director of Villa Noailles, Hyères (excerpt from the book Jacques Sultana, ed. Pierre Passebon, 2022)
His works