Posted By Dja Horry

Jean Miotte: What A Beautiful World
through January 2, 2010
Admission: $8 adults, $4 students, free 16 and under

Chelsea Art Museum
556 west 22nd street
212-255-0719
Hours:
Open Tues – Sat 11am to 6 pm
Thursday 11am to 8 pm
Closed Sunday and Monday
chelseaartmuseum.org
jeanmiotte.com


'Le débat' (1998)


The Chelsea Art Museum – Home of the Miotte Foundation – presents Jean Miotte: It’s A Beautiful World.

"Abstraction is the figuration of the soul," says Jean Miotte. He points to a momento, a snapshot or mirror of an intense emotion. Paralleling his biography with the phases in his work, he creates monochromatic black paintings while he suffers with his Hungarian friends who were confronted with Russian tanks in 1956. He opened his studio for his Hungarian friends, who found refuge there. It is not astonishing that Jean Miotte was the subject of the only one-man exhibition Hungary organized for the 40-year memorial of 1956.

And how can one explain that he painted black-and-white paintings when he was invited for the inauguration of the re-opening of the Museum Sursock in Beirut? He had decided to paint - acknowledging that he was invited as a strong colorist – especially colorful paintings which would convey the idea of a possible future. But each time he stood in front of an empty canvas and set out to prepare a work, a black-and-white painting emerged.

As a young man he started to paint with the intense wish to be able to capture the energetic beauty of choreographers and dancers in the Russian ballets in London in the 40s.

These are three examples which deny the general idea about abstraction. Abstract painting can express in three words what others describe in a complete novel. Miotte’s abstraction is the immediate profound reaction to his surrounding, to the world in a philosophical, not immediately understandable representation. It (not he, the artist) translates and brings onto the canvas what happens in the most intimate reverberations:

"Arising from interior conflicts, my painting is a projection, a succession of acute and intense moments. Painting is not a speculation of the intellect, it is a gesture which comes from within."

Miotte has been invited to show his work in one-man exhibitions in 45 internationally recognized museums. The most unusual was surely the invitation to exhibit in Beijing as early as May 1980, and thus to compare his paintings of the 70s to the works of Asian artists. While he had started off with completely filled canvases which could be classified as “abstract expressionism,” Miotte developed a more and more minimal gestural abstraction which resembled calligraphic Eastern paintings even though the artist had never studied Zen philosophy or paintings from the Far East. Effectively the Chinese artists discovered a familiarity in these works; and they sensed at the same time the differences - where Miotte came from and where they came from - meeting in gestural works which were understandable by both sides. This cultural bridge for which Miotte's work stands makes him unique.

Jean Miotte is a painter who definitely crossed borders in a geographical sense, with his life in Europe and America and his wide acceptance in Asia, but he goes far beyond being a globetrotter in the geographical sense. He paints from within, reaching to and touching souls, who could easily identify themselves with his art. Because his art comes genuinely from within, he touches the inner emotions of art lovers and spectators from anywhere in this world. Thus, we can state that he is universally accepted.