Jehan Legac

Contemporary Painter and Photographer

STATEMENT

My practice unites two disciplines I have pursued in parallel for five decades: photography and painting. From my first cameras in Paris in the 1970s, through photographic missions conducted for the French Navy under the command of Admiral Philippe de Gaulle — from the North Pole to tropical islands — and later in New York and in every capital I have inhabited, the image has remained my language.

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I loved photography because it offered mastery of the instant: a thousandth of a second is enough to seize a light, a gaze, a smile, an anguish, a danger that will never again appear before my eyes in quite the same way. But a photograph rarely lives more than seventy years, and this fragility troubled me for a long time — those patiently captured instants were condemned to fade with their support. Oil painting on canvas, by contrast, can cross the centuries. To share, generations from now, an emotion sealed today in the silence of a studio gives to my natural generosity a pleasure no silver image will ever grant me. It is this desire for duration that led me to painting.

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Today I paint the female form in oil on canvas, in large formats. But before the brush meets the linen, a darkroom of a new kind comes to life. For nearly two years now, I have used generative artificial intelligence as a laboratory — a space in which my own photographs, accumulated over decades, are reworked, transformed, hybridised with my intuitions of the moment. AI is neither the author nor the work: it is a tool, as the analog camera was before it. It demands mastery, dialogue, direction — an eye that knows what it seeks.

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What appears on the canvas — these veiled faces, these silhouettes suspended between presence and absence, this dialogue between deep blue and gold leaf — emerges from a patiently built visual memory. I situate my work in a lineage that, from Warhol to Richter, from Chuck Close to David Salle, has made the technical image the very matter of painting. The manual gesture remains central: each work is a painted object, in oil, in a centuries-old technique.

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I seek to bring forth, in silence, a female figure that escapes narrative — a presence that speaks without words, half portrait, half icon, offered to whoever will discover it, today or three hundred years from now.