*1946 in Tours, FR, lives and works in Paris, FR

Since the mid-1970s, my work has been based on a central idea: my paintings will transcribe the daily or weekly newspapers.

Using this guiding principle, my works have been a rendering on canvas of the primary physical forms of printed information: national, regional or international daily papers (from which I use either the front page or the whole paper), weekly magazines (from which I use the whole issue). 

My works are organized around several serial representations, even when the series is based on a single copy of a paper. Some examples: all the national papers published on a single day, the same paper published on several consecutive days, the same issue of a paper rendered differently or using different visual schemas for representing the successive pages…

The scale and the layout of the pages are determined by the paper’s format, the number of pages (even if they are from different newspapers) of the given series, and also by the chosen format of the stretcher.

The color scheme has remained unchanged from the beginning: red for advertisements, black for photos, grey or white for the rest which is not signified by other colors. Other colors can be added as needed and in that case their number is determined depending on the nature of the series. For instance, at times a different color is used to highlight front page stories that are continued elsewhere in the paper, and this same color is used on those successive pages. In these cases, the specific colors used are randomly selected.

According to these rules, I eliminate esthetic choices from the composition which is given by the paper’s structure, and I don’t take any contrast or compatibility among neighboring colors into account.

In order to move with our times and to remain true to these compositional rules, I added a further time-based constraint: each series is identified by a code whose order sequence respects the chronology of the underlying newspapers (or newspaper) which forms the basis for the series. 

Though I have freely consented to the rules outlined above, observing them forces me to renounce most of the artist’s prerogatives and thus allows me to question the painting in the most objective way as possible.Jean-François Dubreuil, translated by Lucinda Rennison

Jean-François Dubreuil at www.lahumier.com