Jerome Lagarrigue was born in Paris in 1973. He lives and works in New York.
From 1993 to 1996 he studied illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design, and got his BFA.
Jerome Lagarrigue captures the world in his work. Landscapes or human models, the subjects of his paintings are all serving his artistic quest. The Franco-American artist combines figuration and abstraction in his paintings, transparencies and dilutions, reliefs and layers, in order to capture the double dimension of existence. An extension of the philosophical conflict between pragmatism and the metaphysical, his works have two visions, that were opposed until now, reunites them and opens the way to a sensorial and emotional interpretation of form and of substance. His work is an invitation seize the immanence which lies restless under the traits of the ordinary.
Lagarrigue is refined and picky and uses paint not as a subject but as a starting point for understanding things, as a method for deciphering reality. A wrinkle on a forehead betrays one’s age. But that’s not the only thing. The mere sinuosity of the skin keeps in it feelings that cannot be put ito words, and yet everyone knows them.It is the same for landscapes which, when we look at them, give us the sensation of still life, of a postcard, and when the application the pigments are more thick and cracking, through the transparencies they create, are animated by a palpable yet indefinite existential movement. The alternation of figuration and abstract shapes responds to the same expressive and sensitive need. Dripping, disproportions, stains or even the absence of color in a spot where the eye expect to see color, serve this interlude between the perceivable reality and beyond the sensorial, but without falling into surrealism or mysticism.
This is an interesting positioning, as Jerome Lagarrigue’s work brings Art to its original grandeur, that of an emotional alter-ego of conceptual philosophy, where the two of them attempt to interpret life between quantified measuring and immaterial sensation.
