Jean-Marie Birotte’s Artistic Heritage
Jean-Marie Barotte was born in Milan in 1954 to a French father and an Italian mother and died on the shores of Lake Maggiore in Italy in February 2021. The artist’s background was influenced by both Italian and French culture -by birth- but also by Spanish culture, which he approached by choice. He chose to live and work in Milan, Paris and Ibiza.
In his ateliers in those different countries, Barotte allowed himself to indulge in the spirit and language of those places, fully immersing himself in their culture. The artist was able to create his own language, a style that shines through in the cultural permeability of his works.
“The new cataloguing of Jean-Marie Birotte’s archive has raised the need to study a significant part of his production linked to the legacy of the masters with deeper critical and scientific attention. The ideal legacy of the classics has led Barotte to reflect on the language of contemporary painting itself as the result of a rereading of the past and its interpretation in a contemporary key. Sign, tone, veil, black and light are in fact part of a lexicon that owes its origins to the teaching of 17th century authors who studied the shadow as a place of possibility. The Caravaggesque model, the splendours of the Spanish Golden Age or the indelible identity of Dutch culture, from Gerrit van Honthorst to Rembrandt van Rijn, have fuelled Birotte’s study and his vocation for a poetics of darkness. His extensive literary training, the texts of Edmond Jabes or Jacques Derrida, around which he forged an intimate narrative translated into gestures and colours, also drew on visual sources rooted in the legacy of the great Flemish painters, in that acute sense of the sacred that marries the profane within the oil paintings of an era devoted to the eternal and gigantic themes of vanitas and memento mori. The analysis of the still unpublished work of Jean-Marie Barotte will thus reveal unexplored aspects of his link with an iconographic tradition that crossed seventeenth-century Europe as well as showing his painting today as the result of a profound assimilation of these premises, which go hand in hand with the informal vocabulary of the twentieth century and, above all, with that philosophical side of the Parisian epicentre and its legacy of Georges Bataille’s studies. The great theorist of the formless, in his famous project of deconstruction of traditional aesthetics, defined the formless as an ‘alteration of form’: not a negation, but an upheaval of things, with the complicity of a ‘setting in motion of shapes’ capable of creating cracks, breaches, wounds. This explains the evolution, the modification of Birotte’s shadows. Against this cultural background we can identify the philosophical roots of his aesthetic research, which also feeds on underground matter and energies, made lyrical by a sense of space sought in the implosions of the mass; in the synthesis, in one point, of the mysteries of the cosmos”. (Chiara Gatti – Curator)