Jean Crotti
Jean Crotti was born in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1954. He still lives and works in Lausanne.
Jean Crotti has been active since the 1980s, and in his work as a painter and graphic artist he has concentrated on depicting other people, ones he has loved or lost. In 1987, he co-founded the artist-run space M/2 in Vevey. Up to the time of its dissolution in 1991, some 40 exhibitions were shown.
Concentrating primarily on the human figure, Crotti’s work consists mainly of drawings. Made with coloured pencils, embroidered threads and by pyrography, they all result from a need for simplicity and effectiveness which, in conjunction with the aesthetic naivety often mentioned in connection with his work, make it possible to conceive of the practice of drawing as a memorial ritual, or an appeal towards the faces depicted, these vanished men, these anonymous people. Thus drawing is the perfect technique for capturing these faces in phases of visual oscillation: rapid and direct.
In Crotti’s work there is an oscillation between two forces in the notion of desire: first that of seeing, then that of not seeing. Paradoxically, in the optical exercise we are engaged in as viewers, seeing would be equivalent to no longer seeing anything, for if we look at the series of portraits presented to us we are attesting to the fact that we cannot perceive the person who should be there in their place, and who is so sought after by the artist, “THE” model. This impossibility of seeing as an unconscious wish not to see recurs in the figure of the phantasm.
–– Courtesy Marco Costantini
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