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After being honored this summer with a major retrospective at the Vendôme Art Center, Jean Pierre Schneider returns to the gallery where he has been a member for 20 years with the recurring theme that punctuates his work: women.

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The women who appear in Jean Pierre Schneider's work have nothing to do with the artistic cliché of the female nude.​ The bodies do not assert themselves: they seem withdrawn. Fragile presences, almost intruders, they seem to have crossed the threshold of the canvas as if by breaking and entering.

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Without gesture or action, they merely appear. Appear, but in a secondary sense.

For among them, two figures dominate: The Maid of 28.XII.09 and Mme de Valpinçon, figures borrowed from Ingres and Manet. Images reduced to their shadows. Is this why these truncated, two-dimensional bodies slide across the surface?

 

Of these reflections, these representations, only a residual resemblance to their origin remains. The Maid's head dissolves into darkness, Olympia fades into a white blur, and Mme de Valpinçon becomes a discontinuous outline. In other words, the art of painting boundaries. Dematerialized, these women are also depersonalized. Sometimes they turn their backs on us, sometime their faces are emptied of their features—Berthe Morisot— as if their very identity were retreating into the shadows.

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One figure stands apart: The Woman Without Words. How are we to understand this enigmatic title? Is this woman condemned to silence, or has she chosen

to remain silent as a form of passive resistance to the world? We do not know the origin of this image of distress, this body that seems to be decomposing. One thing is certain, however: while Jean Pierre Schneider's women come from elsewhere, The Woman Without Words is slowly dissolving before our eyes.

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But are the artist's women really so different from the male figures he paints—

the swimmers, for example? Perhaps they share Jean Pierre Schneider's dream: bodies that float, defying gravity, freeing themselves from the laws of gravity.

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Thursday, October 23th:

After meeting at Jean Pierre Schneider's studio for a France Culture radio program, writer Christophe Fourvel will continue the discussion at 7 p.m.

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Christophe Fourvel has published twenty-three books in a variety of formats: novels, children's books, theater monologues, short stories, and more. He has written about cinema, soccer, silence, the lives of other writers, and has just ventured into the thorny field of noir fiction. He produces programs for France Culture that highlight literature (with writers Matthieu Messagier and Stig Dagerman) and painting with painter Jean Pierre Schneider.​​