LES IRRADIES

If someone wanted to put Jerôme Borel’s paintings and drawings under house arrest, they would jump on their Larousse dictionary of 20th century art, and hurriedly draw a family tree where one would undoubtedly find the names of Bacon or Richter on top of the list. As a self-taught painter and historian by training, Jerôme Borel followed in the footsteps of these masters, whose trace can be easily identified in his work. But if Borel did not seek to erase the memory of those who marked him in his canvases, it is simply because he is not the victim of that exasperating superstition of the present, which erected novelty as a cardinal aesthetic value. He does not have to conceal his legacy, for he knows that we are all heirs, that images are a matter of memory, and that the operation, not only of painting, but also of the look is always a transplant of memories on the visible reality.