Jean-Christophe Norman

« Le fleuve sans rives » Hans Henny Jahnn, 2024

Installation made up of a thousand pages painted in oil and encaustic
Creation for the 17th Lyon Biennale

« Cover » Les mille et unes nuits, 2019

Book from the Pléiade covered in Indian ink then graphite

« Cover » Conrad, 2019

Book from the Pléiade covered in Indian ink then graphite

« Cover » Shakespeare, 2019

Book from the Pléiade covered in Indian ink then graphite

« Cover » Rimbaud, 2019

Book from the Pléiade covered in Indian ink then graphite

Jean-Christophe Norman’s multidisciplinary work explores the themes of time, space and the body through works based on writing. A lover of mountains — he used to be a professional climber, though he is now no longer able to scale the highest peaks — Norman wanders for hours through cities with a piece of chalk, writing out texts from travel novels in a continuous line. As a visual artist, he expresses himself through painting, photography and video, using overlay and transfer techniques. It is a way, of imbuing texts with a dimension other than that of the spoken word, and translating into images the narratives of works of literature that have helped him in his life.

“In calm seas, the boat disappeared from the surface of the sea”. These were the words Jean-Christophe Norman read when he opened Hans Henny Jahnn’s novel River without Banks (1949) at random. That mysterious sentence was the trigger for Norman to begin a long, painting work based on Jahnn’s travel narrative, which recounts the great journeys of humankind grappling with the elements and interpersonal relations. The artist worked patiently, painting over every one of the book’s thousand pages in oils and encaustic, to create landscapes with multiple variations of colour and light. The resulting artwork is both a novel and a series of paintings that unfold transparently, interweaving the voice of the author with that of the painter.