La Patinoire Royale / Galerie Valérie Bach is pleased to present the second solo exhibition of Christian Jaccard in Brussels. The Franco-Swiss artist of the combustion process, born in 1939, was shaped from his beginnings by the ancestral practice of l’écobuage clearing by fire called culture sur brûlis and wall art dominated by black smoke and its prints. Christian Jaccard questions the dissipated energies ( énergies dissipées title of his first exhibition at the gallery), their creative tensions of innovations, their properties, their universal forces which radiate and transcend the nature of things.

In 1971, the ignition became the medium and the tool of his artistic project and the implementation of dissipated energies that the artist develops through the chemistry of fire and the singularity of its blaze in which he explores the consequences, thus generating a stimulating pictorial transition.

The igneous pathway, an independently incandescent and brilliant pathway with its practice expressed by the flame's rhythm, is above all a luminescent experiment underlining the contrast between shadow and light: source of organic, cosmic, plant and animal life, and on the illuminating properties of human thought, intuitive knowledge, their unconscious and their existence.

During the combustion process, the residual imprint of the thermal gel begets its carbonaceous powder and during this exceptional instant, the soot in the germination state obliterates the supports and draws its shadows. The random juxtaposition of stains on the texture of different formats progressively stigmatizes the resurgence of a parietal art and an updated primitive practice.

The new cycle of the Jeux d’ombre de suie presented at La Patinoire Royale / Galerie Valérie Bach is a key perspective on the work of Christian Jaccard. This cycle is composed of dissipated energies with multiple faces, inspired by many mural combustions made in dormant spaces and recently at Gyeonggi MoMA in Ansan (Korea) the ephemeral painting: Soot Shadows Partition carried out in the spring of 2018 in memory of the 2014 sinking of the Sewol.