Johan Papaconstantino and the Eros of selfies

About the exhibition at Confort Moderne in Poitiers

Until 19/12/2021

What is the point of considering the execution of a painting in the same way as one approaches the writing of a piece of music? In the case of Johan Papaconstantino, it is very clear. His genius lies in the way he transcends his virtuoso mastery of hyper-realistic painting techniques to integrate the leading stylistic figures of the art of painting into the making of his paintings. Johan Papaconstantino thus evokes the great ones like Caravaggio and Ingres in the eyes of Richard Leydier of Art Press. But he completely avoids any desire to pay them a slavish homage by putting the models and codes of this tradition into the same shaker as his RnB mixed with "oriental percussions" and "Greek folklore".  Painting and music are both about the art of composition. And Papaconstantino's brush takes advantage of this bridge to borrow the key figure of today's artistic sound practices that he practices in parallel with talent: sampling.

Why does this fashionable cocktail deserve a close look with the idea that it could be one of the most intellectually exciting avenues a painter of today can offer us? For Papaconstantino is unquestionably a painter of the 2020s. And not the kind to cry in your waistcoat about the deadly competition imposed on painting by the polished and sold-out images of social networks. The ones that you love for ten seconds and then immediately forget. Before generalising this relationship to the image to the whole of the visual arts. Four seconds of attention for the Mona Lisa or Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.

Johan Papaconstantino takes the Minotaur by the horns. He goes so far as to immortalise the practice of selfies in order to better neutralise it. Painting a young woman of today posing in front of her smartphone with bluffing realism from an indiscreet angle is not a simple testimony of the time. This painting kills the photo being taken. It is aesthetically superior to it. It doesn't matter how many pixels there are.

Painting is a machine that makes a mockery of the very result of this act. To represent it is to sanctify in order to better sacrifice this image born of a narcissistic act that cannot be of interest in the light of the painting that denies it. Johan Papaconstantino does not represent today's world. He treats it as a chronicler treats a subject. Like a doctor treats a patient.  But it is to settle his account like a hitman. Paradoxically, he pays homage to him because it is the allusion to this futile modernity that gives the paintings of the painter with the bouzouki their artistic interest. And that makes them devilishly sexy.

The sensual charm of these paintings lies in the striking fact that Papaconstantino's contemporary nymphs are systematically captured in lewd poses from another century. They are frozen in attitudes that are immediately identifiable as belonging to the gestural grammar of classical painting. Dressed in immodest cotton panties and tight, glamorous satin shorts, the Papaconstantinonian creatures seduce with a sensuality that is stronger because it is far more suggestive than the nudity of the followers of Ingres' Turkish Bath itself.  The eroticization of network images is imposed in hyperbole on the web. With the manifest pretension of passing into posterity where his models, multiplied in perishable poses, will evaporate with their conventional and therefore dated digital charm, then very quickly ephemeral.

But blithely dynamiting the images that usually frighten the majority of today's painters is obviously not enough for Johan Papaconstantino. It is as if the very 17th century eroticization that he carries out does not take into account everything that painting today should be. So the nymphs, with their very elaborate near-nudity, are often imprisoned in a capsule reduced to a simple parenthesis on the canvas. A small figurative enclave in an abstract painting whose willingly trashy treatment contrasts with the perfectionist meticulousness of the portraits. It is through these relationships of meaning and these unexpected cohabitations of forms that Papaconstantino's painting is defined.

Illustration : Johan Papaconstantino

- Tondo9 - 2017

- Tondo9 Détail- 2017