WORKSHOP AND EXHIBITION BY PHILIPPE JACQ
APOLLONIA SITE
FROM MARCH 15th TO MAY 5th 2024
Self-taught and multidisciplinary, Philippe Jacq (born in 1971) is developing an art form that focuses on the concept of cultural hybridisation. He is interested in all forms of popular and religious iconography, without hierarchy or limits, from all countries and all beliefs. He is keenly interested in exploiting different textiles, fabrics and paintings.
With this project for a giant frieze made up of fabrics, he likes to wander around flea markets and souks to unearth carpets, embroidery, posters and various other objects, which he then assembles. The re-appropriation of these elements, gleaned from his travels, is evidence of a teeming multicultural personal universe, free of strict codes or constraints, where representations and references cohabit and oscillate between East and West.
Details of Philippe Jacq’s work
Frequently playing with symbols, the artist brings them together and twists them around to produce impertinent compositions and fragmented narratives. Philippe Jacq deliberately distances himself from a political or conceptual discourse, preferring instead to position himself as close to singular art, with the use of ‘poor’ materials, often recycled or diverted through the artist’s own method.
For Espace Apollonia, Philippe Jacq is proposing an immersive installation in situ, a patchwork fresco made up of works linked together like a jigsaw puzzle where everything combines to form a homogenous 3D whole and tell the story of his 50 years of life.
To achieve this, the artist wants to bring out new dynamics in the production of his exhibition: through a participatory and supportive workshop from 13 February to 10 March 2024, the Apollonia team, volunteers, members of the Apollonia public, integration workers from Emmäus Mundo and the Vetis group, companions from Emmäus Scherwiller, as well as students in fashion design and plastic arts, are working together to make Philippe Jacq’s patchwork work.
Photographs of the participatory and supportive workshop
The meetings and exchanges between the artist and the other people involved in this workshop project have brought to the fore questions such as : what does it mean to be a community ? How can we represent the multiplicity and richness of the backgrounds of the individuals in this community ? How can we build a common project ? How can we put into images a memory that is both individual and collective ?
The patchwork will be made entirely from recycled fabrics. The result of four weeks of painstaking collective work orchestrated by Philippe Jacq will be an exhibition on view from 15th March to 5th May 2024 at Espace Apollonia.
Philippe Jacq is represented by Galerie Delphine Courtay – Strasbourg.
Simulation image of Philippe Jacq’s exhibition at Apollonia
“In the hot streets of Oran, Algeria, we used to play soccer with our neighborhood friends using a rubber doughnut. An object we made from slices cut from a bicycle inner tube.
We chalked out our playground on the asphalt.
Defining a playground is what I still do today in my workshop.
I collect a lot of fabrics on my travels. In my stockpile, from floor to ceiling, there’s everything from Tinariwen carpets, home to the nomadic Tuaregs, to flocked or screen-printed T-shirts with colorful patterns, to tapestries found on the sidewalks down the street from my house…
I love wandering and getting lost in Europe’s major capitals, where immigrant populations are concentrated. From Paris’s Chinatown to London’s Pakistani district and Berlin’s Kreutzberg, there are so many places that inspire me.
Our societies are multi-ethnic and multi-confessional, and my paintings are a reflection of it.
I use universal codes and symbols, mixing them together, without censorship, without worrying about antagonisms and crushing communitarianism. My universe is primarily syncretic.
Like the spider, I patiently weave a complex network of forms and words, delimiting pictorial zones and spaces, tracing rhizomes between the West and the East, Europe, where I live today, and Africa, where I was born.
The thread to stitch the memory and stretch the bow.”
Extract from © Quartier Général, Broderies d’un monde vivant
Philippe Jacq