Postmodernity is now an old friend of ours, but yet it still pretty much defines the way we ingest and digest all art and media. Now that it has inhabited our world and been around for five decades, has it become the norm? Is it the de facto regular frame within which we see, read, and listen to things around us, in front of us, behind and ahead of us? This is a question Jean Nipon might or might not have a definite answer to, but at least he tries to produce something about it, to create pieces made into this particular post-modern set-up and mindscape, and maybe will end up getting away with it.

A former Beaux-Arts student born in the late seventies, Paris-based Nipon spent most of his adult life being a musician (a drummer, then an electronic producer) and a DJ. Yet, he never really forgot his visual background, and some years ago, he spontaneously reconnected with drawing. A huge painting buff, Jean roamed virtually every online museum to download HD pics of his favorite works but didn’t have the kind of money to afford, say, a drawing by Ingres, a Jean Dupas painting, or a portrait by Alexander Roslin. So he started to draw the stuff he most revered, with color pencils only. After a while, he decided to fashion more personal pieces, first as low-key, derivative tributes to his masters, then injecting inspirations from his own multiple topics of fascination – horror movies, children’s books, French actresses, ruins, smooth jazz, and hardcore among many other fields. 

Nipon never properly thought about the path he was taking and has always been uninterested in his own personal intentions: he’s mostly focused on the craft and the universal language it allows him to use, bypassing the notion of style as the expression of a self. To him, art can’t be about someone’s randomly specific vision of things. It should be about recognizable items everyone understands the same way, that should be implemented by the artist in his/her work with no emotional input but a rational one.

Color pencils don’t make things easier, but they help him being even more remote from any type of self-polarized worldview. Especially when the pencils he favors are now out-of-stock and only findable (and often outrageously expensive) on eBay.

Nipon dedicated these last five or six years to the painstaking conception of three dozen drawings and spent his days and nights working and researching. The result is a series of gorgeous, mesmerizing pictures, but beauty is not exactly what he’s aiming for. Nipon says he doesn’t want to just recreate the sublime paintings of yesteryear, and he’s definitely not into “remixing” them. He feels the language he’s using (skies, faces, furniture, unfinished buildings) is better understood as theory than narrative; he’s more into connecting thoughts and affects, or building atmospheres, than into proper storytelling. The sensuous experience he’s conjuring in his pictures is not his own, yet it’s not exactly anonymous – more like tiny fumes of aura blended into one another to create something we don’t know specifically but we feel attracted to. 

The sheer prettiness and harmony of his drawings are sometimes so overloaded with (literally) iconic data that the viewer can feel almost nauseous contemplating them. Their use value is almost too much, too saturated, making their exchange value possibly irrelevant. As Giorgio Agamben wrote on Baudelaire’s modernity in art, these works are yearning for their own self-destruction, yet just for a brief moment, they have to be shown, just to make sure they’ll disappear.

Could this be a very late version of Romanticism? A selfless taste for forms originally made to tell stories, then mutated by history into estranged visual artifacts? 

Jean Nipon’s work inhabits that space between post-modernity’s “everything’s mid-brow” mindset and the inner, almost spiritual belief that a Eurodance hit can move you and teach you things the same way a Bach cantata can. Anything can be deeply enjoyable as long as you find the right capitalistic context to enjoy it. Genuine voices will remain unheard, but artists will keep on working on their own. Still, Alice Deejay’s question remains: Are you better off alone?

Do you think you're better off alone?

Do you think you're better off alone?

Do you think you're better off alone?

Do you think you're better off alone?

Talk to me, ooh-ooh, talk to me

Talk to me, ooh-ooh, talk to me

Do you think you're better off alone?

Do you think you're better off alone?

Do you think you're better off alone?

Do you think you're better off alone?

Do you think you're better off alone?

Do you think you're better off alone?

Talk to me, ooh-ooh, talk to me

Talk to me, ooh-ooh, talk to me

Talk to me

Alice Deejay – Better Off Alone (1998)