Jean-Luc Maniouloux

Jean-Luc Maniouloux, visual artist, creates delicate compositions made up of naturalized insects where the living meets the object, often with brilliance (s). Immortalized in plexiglass cases, these lyrical scenes draw the map of a fabulous micro-universe, where nature would regain its rights.

Indeed, the bumblebees, ants and other princes and princesses of the microcosmos hardly seem to care about the obstacles imposed by our manufactured world, and ignoring any constraint, bravely forge their way through each of its counterparts.

Soaked in literary references, the artist-visual artist thus seems to transpose the world of the tiny to that of Man, and through this, to question the human condition: therefore, insects would be a projection of Man grappling with a society bathed in the absurd, captive of a perpetual quest for clarity in an unintelligible world. Thus, when the myth of Icarus takes the form of a graceful butterfly disintegrating in its fall, its apparent fragility can move us because it would have tried to push the limits imposed by its own condition (insect).

As for the myth of Sisyphus, it is here illustrated with a scarab confronting a piece of wallpaper that it takes off and rolls up tirelessly. If the image makes people smile, it nevertheless invokes the notion of surpassing oneself: an act a priori inconceivable and yet brought to an end, which is inscribed like an Ode to freedom where effort would be both key and reward. . As Albert Camus illustrates in his 1942 writing, Le mythe de Sisyphe, "The struggle itself towards the summits is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."

In fact, where the impact could be perceived as destructive, it becomes a movement of liberating, poetic and committed revolt. Although frozen in the solid, the virtuosity of the artist resides on the other hand in his ability to awaken each of the spectator's senses and to make this frozen image a quasi-animated work: when the stimulated imagination prolongs the action in thought, it would then suffice to strain your ears to perceive the sound produced by this collision.