Comunicato Stampa

From 5 to 31 October, the Fabbrica del Vapore in Milan will host the first major retrospective dedicated to the work of Jean-Marie Barotte (1954-2021), promoted by the Municipality of Milan – Culture and Fonds Barotte Madau with the association T.Art and produced by Fonds Barotte Madau and Fabbrica del Vapore. The exhibition, set up in the Spazio Messina on the ground floor, is curated by Chiara Gatti and Marco Bazzini with the artistic direction of Maria Cristina Madau.

Born in 1954 to a French father and an Italian mother, after several activities in the Milanese cultural scene, in particular with the Milanese company Teatro AlKaest, Jean Marie Barotte embraces the world of experimental theater, which leads him to experience acting, directed by the great director and painter Tadeusz Kantor. Starting from the end of the 1980s, thanks to the years of experimentation spent alongside the great director, Barotte felt the need to develop his own language, creating his first drawings during tours in hotel rooms around the world. From here, his journey as an artist began, to give a new form to his thoughts, thus arriving at painting.

The artist’s expressive world has the physiognomy of an interior journey, a journey that takes its cue and inspiration from literature and philosophy: the links with the literary work of Edmond Jabès, the poetic work of Paul Celan, the spiritual journey of San Juan de la Cruz, the philosophical work of Jacques Derrida, inspire the artist in a continuous philosophical-pictorial narration. His works bear witness to a profound reflection, formal and conceptual, that has matured in step with his intimate journey; that journey that in the series inspired by the Noche oscura del alma di San Juan de la Cruz leads from darkness to light. The velvety blacks bring out a distant glimmer and reveal an alternative path to the darkness, giving shape to that continuous dialogue of existence with the fragile horizon of finitude.

Jean-Marie Barotte’s works are thresholds that look out towards visions of worlds, which the artist reveals to the viewer, making him a participant. Each of these thresholds urges us to meditate and invites us to abandon the flow of our thoughts; it creates the formal conditions to lead us before the abyss to contemplate it without fear.

The installation will transform the spaces of the Fabbrica del Vapore into a labyrinth of rooms for the first time, like cloistered studios or small wunderkammers, connected to each other to evoke the timeline, the flow of thoughts and that margin of demarcation between different environments and worlds, but at the same time communicating.

The exhibition traces the artist’s reflection from 1987 with Au commencement était le signe, the beginning of his pictorial journey during international tours with the theater, up to Tout se tient en équilibre précaire, created in December 2020, a month before his death.

The exhibition’s progression is configured as an initiatory journey consisting of nine thematic rooms: The Theater Room, Au commencement était le signe and The Secret Garden, Erotic Meditations, The Dark Night, Voyage de l’âme, NEROCENERE, Cosmographies, the Ultima Suite Installation, and Tout se tient en équilibre précaire.

Barotte’s working method proceeds by subtraction: removing what is superfluous and subjective to get closer to the essence of the object of study.

The profound meaning of his silences and absences is to be considered a long meditation that manifests itself through his research, the impalpable materials, the shapes, the signs, the alchemical blacks from which light and color emerge. His painting expresses itself like poetry, moving between continuous philosophical references. Jean-Marie Barotte, in the course of his tireless research on the means and language of painting, created his own black smoke through a personal technique, ritually sedimenting the ash, “what remains of the fire”. Jean-Marie Barotte used poetic and philosophical writing as a pictorial detonator, entrusting to the image what the fire left.