Date 2023 Height (cm) 21 Length (cm) 13 Depth (cm) 2 Weight (g) 250 Materials and Techniques Black stone Subject/Description Joël Person uses the notebook as a travel tool, accompanying his travels in the same dynamic as La Déferlante, an endless cavalcade. His horses are also the distant echo of these peoples of nomadic riders who set out to conquer new territories. Moleskine: the travel diary like a « déferlante de poche ». Archival Fund Festival du Dessin Arles Archive number - 455 Bibliography Joël Person was born in 1962 in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. He lives and works in Paris. With the jury's congratulations, a Beaux-Arts de Paris graduate devoted himself to portraiture before favouring the themes of the horse and erotic poses. Painter and draftsman, he combines the almost classical purity of line and a rare intensity of expression in his compositions. Joël Person knows the pitfalls of virtuosity. He seeks the moment when the nervous impulse, the spurt of the living, will subvert the neat frame of the figuration.
A memory of his childhood, the horse has a very strong presence in his work. Saturated with energy, the horse's body has given it, for twenty years, this experience of overflowing and submersion. But Person is also a draftsman of the human figure. To thwart his figurative technique, he watches for the breaking point in the static ritual of the pose. This moment when the model rears up and flees elsewhere, he captures it everywhere and nowhere: a contraction of the forehead, a twist of the shoulder, a tilt of the face. It maintains the realistic illusion of painting. The intense life of his portraits is not born of an expressionist style. However, in an anxious tension, it arises from the artist's confrontation with this "self" of the other, this sudden freedom, this solitude in its raw state, which suddenly, very briefly, arises between the surface of the body and the tension of the nervous system.
The artist has several personal and group exhibitions in France and China, and many institutions have shown an interest in his universe. All the residences in which he has participated worldwide testify to his international trajectory (China, on several occasions, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Ireland, and Slovenia). His work is present in many private collections and several of importance; the Hermès collection, in particular, exhibits its drawings and paintings in its boutiques worldwide (Paris, Milan, Istanbul, Tokyo, Shanghai, Dubai and Las Vegas). Personal data Abidjan, Ivory Coast. Painter and draftsman