"Jean Tirilly (1946-2009) - Abstraction - Outsider Art - Singular Art"
Superb acrylic on cardboard by Jean Tirilly. Signed, undated, a work from the "beginnings" of Jean Tirilly in the years 1993-1994, not codexed this time.
Dimensions: 60 cm x 40 cm, at sight.
Jean Tirilly is a key player in Art Brut and Art Singulier, he has exhibited in Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, France. His works have been included in "La collection de l'Art Brut" in Lausanne. They (and him) have especially touched many amateurs and collectors. Although this artist left us recently, it is estimated that he must have produced around 2000 paintings and more than 1000 drawings. A compulsive, assiduous, dedicated creator.
"If the word "singular" has a meaning, it is indeed to Jean Tirilly's painting that it can be applied. I see a lot of images passing by. Rarely have I discovered such an enigmatic and living world in obvious, fascinating, and completely unexpected, unpredictable. A brilliant work is first of all a surprise. It seems to come from elsewhere, from an unknown planet. And like a gift of life, it always gives more than what than one would expect. There are paintings that seduce you immediately. Over time, you get tired of them. The more you look at them, the more they become exhausted. In the end, you see too many "where it comes from, how it's done. What we liked at first suddenly seems poor, elementary, lacking in mystery and complexity... I found in the astonishing works of Tirilly just the opposite, a complete world, inexhaustible, resistant to pure analytical comprehension, like life
I only once visited Jean tirilly, finally yielding to the pressures of his admirer. He had been described to me as living as a recluse, it is indeed as a great solitary, entirely devoted to the daily exploration of his inner universe; sailor on a freighter aged sixteen to twenty-two, then, among other things, a diver in a restaurant to one day afford the freedom to paint. Tirilly is a child of the 70s, who first wanted to be a writer and published poems with small publishers in the region. For about ten years since he started painting, he always works in acrylic, generally on paper, more rarely on canvas, even on the back of an oilcloth, and he brings up his images from a black background, like a photo in the developer…
How to describe these human frays, this swarm of life, this frenetic and colorful match that Tirilly's paintings depict? With these faces, masks with hollow orbits, mouths always open, like burst pumpkins or old broken locks, the skilful play of colored interlacing, stylizations of arms and legs without bodies, and glimpses of the sky or the sea or pieces rural settings, bits of landscape, houses, villages, minimally treated, as in the backgrounds of the Italian primitives. A world of joyful dying, effervescent undead, zombies on the prowl closer to the ballad of the hanged or a festive vision of the last judgment than to the profane frivolity of Commedia del arte. Because the very skilfully controlled color is misleading in the universe of Tirilly, where the mower, the ankou of the parish closes prowls, with a comic strip coloring. A monstrous Halloween, the tournaments and pitched battles of Jean Tirilly are a theater of puppets where life and death are played out in a furious stadium.
“Art should always make you laugh a little and scare a little,” said Dubuffet. It is from this ambiguity that arises all the tension that is the strength of Jean Tirilly's images. A very mental art, condensed with life, where in a symbolic writing of great coherence, this Villon of painting, a great poet of a time of change, offers us, with a minimum of accessories, a child's boat for say the sea, a steering wheel to evoke a car, beautiful non-verbal fables on the current adventures of the human condition. The truth is always bitter like medicine, you have to wrap it in sugar to get it through. It is the whole game of art which, spontaneously, knows how to go to the essential and hide the drama under shimmering surroundings.
Laurent Danchin 2002"
Le Magazine de PROANTIC
TRÉSORS Magazine
Rivista Artiquariato