A colorful character, generous and prolific artist, multi-faceted creator, Jean Messagier (1920-1999) is a French painter, sculptor and printmaker. He studied at the National School of Decorative Arts in Paris. Attached to various post-war artistic movements (Lyrical Abstraction, Cloudy and Tachist), he never wanted to choose between Abstraction and Figuration. His work is characterized above all by extreme exuberance and great poetry. In the 1940s, the artist's work showed an important influence on Pablo Picasso. During the following decade, Jean Messagier marked a voluntary break with Post-Cubism with an Expressionist tendency.
His prints and paintings then reflect a more personal vision, where he strives to restore “a light different from that of the Impressionists” that he had “sensed abstractly”. He works in direct contact with nature, sculpting sand, snow or mowed grass. From the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 70s, seeking the place of man in nature and of nature in art, Jean Messagier experimented with new techniques, new materials and worked to grasp nature. In the series of “freezes”, at night in temperatures below zero, he captures the drawings of air and cold that are part of water-based paint.

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” I am moving towards ecology, I now have to use all the elements, their extension, their effects.” “This is how I arrived at the herbal prints and especially the gels that I mechanically placed on the canvas so that they would leave their traces there.”
‍Jean Messagier