UN ARC-EN-CIEL​ EN PLEINE NUIT: JACQUELINE LAMBA

Art, poetry, is the precipitation of beauty into emotion. (Jacqueline Lamba)

Shapes come and go, are born, disappear and sometimes re-emerge, after years or centuries, only to vanish again, inevitably. We are constantly navigating between discovery and rediscovery, innovation and renovation, if we can separate these two notions.

Faced with this impermanence, perhaps we shouldn't be asking ourselves what the forms should be - what art should be - but rather what research resonates with us in our contemporaneity, and what research we wish to devote time to. In response to these questions, our contemporary reality - mine at least, that's where I'm coming from - tends to push us towards artists in struggle, towards shapes that twist our imaginations to reveal new ones, that deconstruct to better open up, that allow other perspectives. In this context, what does the rediscovery of Jacqueline Lamba's work offer us? Where do her skies of light and colour lead? Her need for poetry, beauty and ecstasy? At first glance, you may see superfluous aesthetic « (d)ébats », but you need to go further. 

The shadow does not exist, it is already the light. (JL) 

Jacqueline Lamba's paintings focus on light, transparency and imperceptible movement - the invisible that governs our environment and magnifies it for us to see. Through her paintings we learn to see, even before we learn to see better. We learn to see, and therefore to be in the world, perhaps to live in it better.

At the heart of the ambient asphyxia, of the struggles that constantly leave us breathless, Jacqueline Lamba's works function like breaths. Far from luxury and superficiality, they are a remedy for suffocation.

I'm staying on this raft for a few more days, with the clouds for company. (JL)

— Grégoire Prangé, Paris, March 2022