At the Fabbrica del Vapore the first major retrospective devoted to Jean-Marie Barotte

From Oct. 4 to 31, 2024, the Fabbrica del Vapore in Milan will host the first major retrospective dedicated to Jean-Marie Barotte (1954-2021), set up in the Spazio Messina on the ground floor, curated by Chiara Gatti and Marco Bazzini, with the artistic direction of Maria Cristina Madau, promoted by the Municipality of Milan - Culture and the Fonds Barotte Madau, in collaboration with the T.Art association, and produced by the Fonds Barotte Madau and the Fabbrica del Vapore.

Jean-Marie Barotte, born in 1954 to a French father and an Italian mother, had several experiences in Milanese cultural circles, collaborating in particular with the Teatro AlKaest company. Later, he approached research theater, experiencing acting under the direction of the famous director and painter Tadeusz Kantor. In the late 1980s, after years of experimentation alongside the director, Barotte felt the need to develop his own artistic language. He thus began to create his first drawings while touring, in hotel rooms around the world, starting an artistic journey that led him to express his thoughts through painting.

Jean-Marie Barotte’s expressive world is characterized by an inner journey, inspired by literature and philosophy. His works draw from connections with the literary work of Edmond Jabès, the poetry of Paul Celan, the spiritual path of San Juan de la Cruz and the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, resulting in a continuous philosophical-pictorial narrative. Barotte reflects deeply both formally and conceptually, developing a vision that leads from darkness to light, as in the series inspired by San Juan de la Cruz’s Noche oscura del alma. His velvety blacks bring out a glimmer of distant light, suggesting an alternative path to darkness and representing the ongoing dialogue of existence with the fragile horizon of finitude.

Barotte’s works are thresholds that open to visions of new worlds, revealed by the artist to the viewer, inviting him or her to participate.

The exhibition design will transform the spaces of the Fabbrica del Vapore for the first time into a labyrinth of rooms, like cloistered studios or small wunderkammer, interconnected to evoke the timeline, the flow of thoughts and the demarcation between different but communicating environments and worlds. The exhibition traces Jean-Marie Barotte’s artistic evolution from 1987, when he began his pictorial journey with Au commencement était le signe, during international theater tours, to Tout se tient en équilibre précaire, made in December 2020, a month before his death.

The exhibition itinerary takes the form of an initiatory journey composed of nine thematic rooms: The Theater Room, Au commencement était le signe and The Secret Garden, Méditations érotiques, La noche obscura, Voyage de l’âme, NEROCENERE, Cosmographies, the Installation Ultima Suite and Tout se tient en équilibre précaire.

Barotte’s working method is based on subtraction: eliminating all that is superfluous and subjective in order to approach the essence of the object of study. The profound significance of his silences and absences should be understood as a long meditation manifested through his research, the impalpable materials, forms, signs and alchemical blacks from which light and color emerge. Barotte’s painting expresses itself as a poem, amid continuous philosophical references. In the course of his relentless research into pictorial media and language, he has created his own particular black smoke through a personal technique, ritualistically settling ash, “what remains of the fire.” Barotte used poetic and philosophical writing as a pictorial detonator, entrusting to the image what the fire left behind.

“The ideal legacy of the classics led Barotte to reflect,” emphasizes curator Chiara Gatti, “on the very language of contemporary painting as the result of a reinterpretation 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 shadow as a place of possibilities. The Caravaggesque model, the splendors of the Spanish Siglo de Oro, or the indelible identity of Dutch culture, from Gerrit van Honthorst to Rembrandt van Rijn, fueled Barotte’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 colors, also drew on visual sources rooted in the legacy of the great Flemish painters, in that acute sense of the sacred marrying the profane within the oil paintings of an era devoted to the eternal and gigantic themes of vanitas and memento mori. Analysis of Jean-Marie Barotte’s as yet unpublished work will thus reveal unexplored aspects of his connection to an iconographic tradition that spanned seventeenth-century Europe and sees his painting today as the result of a profound assimilation of such premises mixed, however, with the informal vocabulary of the twentieth century and, above all, with that philosophical side of the Parisian epicenter, heir to the studies of Georges Bataille.”

“The small format used by Jean-Marie Barotte is the desire to transport on canvas the minimal gesture, whispered rather than traced by the painter’s action,” adds Marco Bazzini. “It is an approximation to silence that rips open the field of seeing to update the gaze beyond the immediacy of our reality. It brings us back to a space of care that means inclination toward the other, even when the other is the tiny surface that houses the colors.”

The exhibition will be accompanied by a monographic catalog published by Silvana Editoriale with critical texts by Marco Bazzini, Chiara Gatti, Sara Chiappori, and Federico Crimi.

For info: https://www.fabbricadelvapore.org/

Hours: Monday through Friday from 12 to 8 p.m.; Thursday from 12 to 10 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.

Image: Parade without a crocodile, directed by Luigi Arpini, with Jean Marie Barotte, Marzia Loriga, Alessandra Magliani, Moni Ovadia, Giovanni Battista Storti. Alkaest Theater with CRT Centro di Ricerca per il Teatro, Milan, June 1, 1984

At the Fabbrica del Vapore the first major retrospective devoted to Jean-Marie Barotte

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