Jef Banc’s first retrospective at Galerie Chloé Perrin “Chaque Jour est ma Naissance”

Jef Banc’s first retrospective at Galerie Chloé Perrin “Chaque Jour est ma Naissance” (Every Day is My Birth) marks the re-emergence of the artist into the public spotlight, after choosing to work sequestered in his studio on the rue de Clignancourt for three decades, after his last exhibition in 1986 until his death in 2021.

The artist lived an incredible life, having been saved with his family from the roundup during the Second World War and secretly taking an art course with his brother at the Paris Chamber of Commerce vocational school during this time. After moving into his studio at seventeen, further artistic training and military service, Jef began to exhibit around the world in the late 1950s.

Throughout the decades, paper in all its forms was integral to Banc’s practice, from his use of Whitman paper in the 1920s and 30s to the 1970s, when through a collector friend Banc enjoyed access to a large stock of high-quality paper from the French stationary company Canson. Various types of paper became his painting surface, including pure rag paper, Arches paper, Moulin Richard de Bas paper, Fabriano paper and even newsprint. “He believed that a work should stand the test of time and quality paper was the essential and durable means of achieving this,” says Julie Banc on her father’s use of the material. In paintings that walk the tightrope between figurative and abstraction, the artist mixes Jungian symbols with “sexual and cosmic fissures” and organic forms. For this show, gallerist Chloé Perrin focused on Banc’s pink period, with all works being on paper, characteristic of his practice. If paper was a common thread in Banc’s work, so too was a connection to language and literature.

An avid reader with an interest in the idea of a collective unconscious, Banc drew inspiration and specific symbols from the writings of theorists and psychoanalysts like Carl Jung, as well as the alchemists. Later in life, when picking up a book of Gregorian chant, as his daughter Julie tells it, the artist was immediately struck by the feeling that the musical staves gave life to the shapes he was evoking through painting. This discovery spurred an obsession with finding books at antique booksellers in Paris, such as Laurent Coulet and Chamonel, and also at book fairs. Over the course of Banc’s career the artist would intervene and transform the pages of Caldani’s book on Anatomy, Van Dick’s Illustrious Men, a Bible from 1789, and Montfaucon’s Antiquité Expliquée, using these pages as the foundation for his painting practice.

Currently on display at Galerie Chloé Perrin, in addition to the pink period paintings, are small works of a different palette featuring the pages of 17th and 18th century French administrative documents with official seals and stamps and large scale works using French newsprint from the 1950s. In a sea of plum and pink, it was these striking monochromatic works I was most drawn to, with the artist’s own scrolling lines superimposed on the paper surface, dialoguing with the material. These works evidence
the artist’s sensitivity to the written word and the grounding force it provided to his artwork.

In a practice untouched by public opinion or scrutiny for decades, the show offers a rare glimpse at what happens when artists are left free to create, un-tethered to the pressures of society and art world trends. The show is a triumph and for Banc and his family, it is like a birth: a celebration and a promise of more to come.