A funny, unclassifiable artist, who refuses to see art as something
(too) serious, Jacques
Charlier defines
himself as an eclectic radical. As a teenager, he vowed to be an artist who
touches everything and doesn’t give up on anything. His parents refused to enroll
him in the art academy, so he trained as a mechanic and studied history of art
as an autodidact. From then on, he read, collected, visited and especially
copied the great Masters until he became, according to him, ‘a kind of juke box
of painting’. In order to gain his freedom and be able to fulfill his dreams,
Jacques Charlier had to find a job to put food on the table: he started working
at the Provincial Technical Service (STP) of Liège from 1958 to 1978 and became
professor of graphic design at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Liège from
1978 to 1999
He started his artistic career in the early 1960s. His first exhibitions
were directed towards the assembly of collected neo-Dadaist objects, associated
with photographs. In 1963, he started a collection of professional photographs
with the help of André Bertrand, with whom he worked at the STP in Liège. At
that time, Pop Art and New Realism were in full swing. He then questioned the
phenomenon of fashion and developed a critical language towards historicity in
art, which became the general topic of his approach. He then made transparent
photographic enlargements that he placed in light boxes glued on panels but he
then destroyed them as well as his previous collages. He subsequently embarked
upon creating paintings with black marker on which appear objects, scenes with
characters, concrete blocks. In 1966, he received a mention at the Young
Belgian Painting.
From 1965 to 1969, his productions went into different directions:
musical and video-graphic experiences, conferences on art, poetic texts,
editions of a magazine, a radio talk show about the group Total’s[1], an artistic detox centre, etc. With Marcel
Broodthaers, Jacques Charlier frequented the most famous Belgian galleries. He
met Kosuth, Toroni, Buren, with whom he became friends. In 1970, he met Fernand
Spillemaeckers who had just opened the MTL Gallery in Brussels. The latter
organised the first exhibition of the professional photographs of the STP,
which were met with success, stimulated by the advent of minimal and conceptual
art. Following Paysages
professionnels,
Jacques Charlier successively produced Paysages urbain, familial et utilitaire in opposition to the minimalism in
fashion; Paysages artistiques applying the idea of ‘painting a
tree’ for real and Paysages
culturels, an audio
cassette broadcasting the recording of a vernissage. His productions during
this period include Photographies
de vernissage (1974/1975),
a first comic strip (Rrose Melody, 1978), caricatures of the world of
international art as well as musical experiments.
In the early 1980s, Jacques Charlier returned to painting by parodying
the return to the market of pictorial figuration (the Plinthuresseries). In 1986, with Chambre d’ennemi, made in Ghent for the exhibition Guest
Houses, he gave free rein to his growing interest in staging with the
participation of live actors and the addition of objects to reconstitute
fantastic atmospheres. From 1986 until the 1990s, he resorted to processes that
he deliberately wanted outrageously regressive. His paintings presented in old
frames, aged and cracked artificially, were accompanied by second-hand objects,
modelled figurines... almost caricatures. He exploited various themes, such as
that of Joan of Arc or Saint Rita, patroness of desperate causes.
In
1988, under a pseudonym, he presents Peintures-Schilderijen, a collection of 15 artists invented from scratch (with supporting
biographies) with as proclaimed objective to break with styles, creating
confusion and interpreting artistic currents in implosive scenarios. It is
during that period that he made his large installations combining painting and
objects, around general themes, emphasising the manipulations that images can
serve, including in the artistic field. Humour and poetic evocation, however,
prevent the work from appearing unnecessarily moralizing. Thus, from the
adjective ‘cerebral’, often used by art critics, he imagines the pictorial
painting style referring to it and adds a ceramic brain, placed on a pedestal.
[1] From 1965 to 1968, Jacques Charlier has
been animating the underground magazine Total's in Liège, actually a simple leaflet
printed with a mimeograph, as well as a group organizing happenings around
urbanization and environment. One of the most striking happenings took place in
1967, a day of protests against nuclear power. The Total's group marched
through the streets of Brussels with their lips closed with Band-Aid, holding a
transparent flag and distributing leaflets that were also transparent.
