L’Evangile Selon de Saint Jean
Le Diagonal
The gold of the illuminators, the violent contrasts of red and yellow inherited from the Mozarabic Apocalypses, angels and demons, saints and patriarchs, crosses, ciboriums, candlesticks: at first glance, Jane Le Besque’s work seems to come straight out of some pious and barbaric Middle Ages.
However, an initial examination of the drawings immediately reveals some rather un-Catholic details in this profusion of religious symbols: the lips hemmed with angels are obviously those of women, the saints’ faces, which are too beautiful and too smooth, could be those of androgynous women, the biblical figures depicted (among whom the artist sometimes stages herself) are often nothing more than perverse beings. What Jane Le Besque proposes is not a return to sacred art, but an ironic rereading of a whole iconography which, under her brush, reveals a very “modern” strangeness.
Of English origin, the artist behaves towards the themes of the Western faith as the painters of the Renaissance did towards those of the Greco-Latin religion: Christianity becomes here, in turn, mythology…
Extrait, Pierre Le Coz
