Jacques Sultana
Painter
“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, driven 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 knew later that he reproduced this pattern of rupture, even with his friends.
I discovered Jacques’ work when a collector asked for my expertise. Troubled by the hyperrealism of his painting, he feared a technical trickery akin to retouched photography.
Breathless after climbing the seven floors, I entered the painter’s world: an accumulation of portraits of men. Every wall was covered with them, piles of them piling 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. If 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 attitude of the model. In this way, Jacques Sultana removes all the ambiguity of a hackneyed game of hide-and-seek between exhibitionism and voyeurism, preferring instead to stage a direct, head-on relationship between a naked body that is fully offered up and the person 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 creeps in: the sunny radiance of youth rubs shoulders with the melancholy of a lost paradise.
Jean-Pierre Blanc, General Manager of the Villa Noailles in Hyères (excerpt from the book Jacques Sultana, ed. Pierre Passebon, 2022)
His works
Aucune œuvre liée trouvée.