Jacques KÉDOCHIM

Jacques Kédochim, a French painter, began his artistic training at the Atelier de la Vigne in the prestigious Etampes school, directed by Philippe Lejeune. There he discovered the demands of a classical and academic knowledge transmitted in the traditional way, the difficulty but also the exhilarating fulgurating work alla prima.

He then joined the Académie de Port-Royal (formerly the Académie Julian) - from which he graduated Grand Prix in 2015 - where he acquired mastery of composition and color, increased freedom in the transposition of realities and developed his work with materials.

If his portraits and still lifes seduce from the outset by their organic and direct character, it is especially his urban scenes that stand out by the intelligence of their composition.

His series entitled "Urban Mirrors" is particularly bewitching. Between real and unreal, it provokes a disturbing feeling of déjà-vu; the sensation of having already lived the situation painted. Crosswalks, bay windows, lampposts... Like the memory of a previous life, one believes to recognize everything of this landscape reconstituted by superimposed filters where the moving silhouettes become ghostly, where the known is transformed into unknown.

The painter works his compositions by superimposing planes around a focal point, often a character. Then he inserts color, balances the colored masses, adds, removes and replaces visual elements. The motif, the flat tints of color struggle with the figuration and the clear line. The layers accumulate, combine, intertwine to form a unique assembly. The artist digs the buried sense towards memorial refuges where the real rubs shoulders with the approximation, and the deconstruction that of the representation.

The viewer, confronted with the accumulation of planes and the "pictorial disorder" sparse with shimmering colors, walks through the paintings and is caught by their dreamlike and timeless character which inscribes them in a filiation to the themes dear to Edward Hopper.

Jacques KÉDOCHIM is a member of the Taylor Foundation, a member of the Artistes Français and of the Salon d'automne. He is a member of the international movement "Destructuralism Figurative".