JEAN-MARIE PLANQUE
1932-1992

He was born in Tournai in 1932, after having followed the courses of various academies of Fine Arts, he decided to devote his free time to his studio but will always refuse to work in a commercial perspective. he collaborated with his friend Paul Delvaux

Close to the Belgian writer Marcel Moreau, the artist will often work with this latent literary influence (he was an admirer of Henry Miller, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Louis Aragon, André Malraux or even Léo Ferré) Consumed by illness his career s interrupted, too early in 1992. Since then, his wife Gerda has endeavored to promote his work through exhibitions in Tournai in 1995, Brussels in 1994 etc... and bequests to our Museums.

 

At the crossroads of two eras, in a period of artistic uncertainty traumatized by the upheavals left as a legacy by the magnificent and monstrous genius Picasso, before the resumption of a sometimes uncertain succession in search of new and sometimes hypothetical revolutions, modern among the classics, classic among the avant-garde, Planque translates the expression of a malaise specific to a category of artists of his time.
Heirs to a tradition that has its origins in the Renaissance, loving and passionate heirs  of an unprecedented artistic revolution that occurred at the dawn of their century, they now intend to react to what they consider as recoveries of an "invention" erected into a system. Abstraction for abstraction's sake is not an end.
This period of art history still suffers from its relative youth.
The concomitant entry into force of conceptual art certainly contributed to overshadowing the pictorial production of these intermediate years. Production that time will recognize as a necessary milestone during which artists work  for continuity and open the doors to new possibilities.
He who did not want to belong to any school and did not attend them unwittingly painted the spirit of his time.
His training as a typographer was decisive.
Initials, calligraphy, layouts are the sources of his strongest compositions.  
Detached from pure figuration but in reaction to total abstraction, he will construct a work  dedicated to figurative abstraction which will evolve around fundamental classical themes. His references will be those of his great contemporaries of the first half of the 20th century: Picasso, Klee, de Staël, Poliakoff, Vieira da Silva.

I had the opportunity to acquire the entire collection that his widow kept.