Jacques Le Brusq’s painting is the result of an intimate experience : being close to the powerful and mysterious nature of the Landes de Lanvaux forest in Morbihan. In the mid-1960s, he decided to settle in Saint Guyomard, at the Cour de Bovrel, an old manor house dating from the 15th century.
That’s how the colour green came to him. “Green chose me,” he would say modestly when he started painting trees and undergrowth. Then came the wide open spaces of the Beauce region, plains where the boundaries of the landscape blurred to the point of abstraction. And then the coasts of the Rhuys peninsula, with contours that change with the tides, and an infinite palette of yellows, greens and browns.
But Jacques Le Brusq is not a landscape painter. He is not concerned with representation. His domain is different and it would be more appropriate to evoke a project, a search. Nature resists, it does not allow itself to be approached in such a familiar way, it escapes the bonds of any grammar, even a pictorial one. The point here is not to take an aesthetic view of the motif, which would lead back to the pleasure of the amateur. That would be to place art in the realm of the confectioner*. Its purpose is more profound.
Facing the elements, the details of the landscape, tirelessly trying to capture its essence, to restore its presence, requires both great humility and infinite tenacity. You have to know how to take a back seat, to accept that you’re only there to accompany the work in progress. In this way, Jacques Le Brusq seeks to eliminate the “I” from the act of painting or, in his own words, to reach the stage where “painting does itself”. A quest that, from painting to painting, has retained all the nobility of its original enthusiasm.

JLG

* Martin Heidegger, Introduction à la métaphysique, Vrin, 1980.

Galerie Gaïa, 4 rue Fénelon, 44000 Nantes. Du 2 au 20 avril2024