For Jean-Louis Bessède, all possible means are experimented with to make the material speak, to extract its soul, to sublimate it, to spiritualise it. All imaginable "modes of action" are at work, most often together, in an exalted gesture that resembles some barbaric, magico-religious or shamanic ritual. Anonymous figures, mythical characters from the history of art or perhaps simply the first man facing his cosmogony, seeking his own genesis appear furtively in this polymorphous jostling of pictorial practice, which becomes total plastic writing.

As if this extraction of a truth nestled deep within oneself or of an original consciousness buried in the collective memory, required furiously digging the material in its very entrails.

Pierre Souchaud

Writer, essayist, founder of the magazine Artension