PARIS.- Galerie Nathalie Obadia is presenting in Paris Portraits du paradis, a new solo exhibition by Jérôme Zonder. For the first time since 2018, this new body of work brings together all the characters/models that have accompanied the artist for over twenty years: Pierre-François, Baptiste and Garance, figures borrowed from Marcel Carné’s film Les Enfants du Paradis. Through them, Jérôme Zonder continues his exploration of portraiture where his drawing practice is constantly evolving.
"How can we depict the human figure today, when we don't even know what it looks like, or what it should look like?" asks the artist. Contemporary anthropological shifts-linked to technological advancements, to the proliferation of images and to the omnipresence of screens-are deeply transforming bodies and behaviors. It is precisely this complexity that the draftsman explores through his portraits: Jérôme Zonder interrogates bodily, physical, mental, and digital memories, to create his figures, which seem to flicker so as to better probe their mysteries. While some appear hesitant, groping their way under the artist's imprint, others are more rigid, chiseled by a bold line. His portraits oscillate between assertion and uncertainty, permeated by thousands of images-collected over many years-that structure, as best they can, the intimate architecture of his characters.
Pierre-François is the focal point of this body of work. He initiates a dialogue between image, material, and text, which runs through the entire exhibition. The various writing systems intertwine and collide, responding to one another in a ripple effect, and transcend the boundaries of these figures to reach the surfaces that host them. It teems, swarms, breathes, bursts, and spills, generating new images through these juxtapositions¹. These visual effects arise from the diversity of images deployed within a rich graphic repertoire, challenging the spectator's gaze to find its way through them.
Historical archives, cinematic scenes, and current events-in their excesses of both violence and joy-overlap without hierarchy, concealed behind a half-open shirt or lodged in the characters' minds. Added to this plurality is a deliberate focus on text: heterogenous typographies, narrative fragments, slogans or dialogues from the film from which they are drawn are inscribed directly into the image, contributing as much to its construction as to its interpretation. In Etude pour un portrait de Pierre-François #113, the latter seems crushed by the front grille that presses down on his chest. Signs of the world scroll past him within a grid-like architecture, much like an Instagram feed: Pierre-François remains, passive, kept alive by this insipid material. What constitutes him is also what exhausts him.
Jérôme Zonder's virtuosity allows him to explore every facet of drawing, from hyperrealism to abstract compositions, right down to the textures created by the palm of his hand or his fingerprints, attesting to his physical engagement in the creative process. The work of the hand-rubbing, pressing, erasing-imprints his body directly onto the drawn surface: the subtly nuanced blacks produce a dense matter, evoking both the skin and the gray matter of his subjects, carbon being one of the fundamental components of the human body.
These gestures also embody a form of resistance in the technological age, where the question of bifurcation is implicit. As our societies organize themselves around machines operating at ever-increasing speeds, humans find themselves trapped in a logic of acceleration that exceeds their cognitive capacities, at the risk of being progressively stripped of them. As Bernard Stiegler put it, the bifurcation designates a critical point from which a system-in this case, humans in their relationship to technology-can embark on divergent trajectories.
Whereas contemporary devices tend toward a continuous modulation of flows², Jérôme Zonder's work reaffirms the power of interruption and displacement. His gestures introduce a different temporality, one that escapes the logic of calculation and optimization. It is in these intervals that the artist's freedom lies: to bifurcate out of desire, out of surprise, and according to an organic thought process-dimensions that elude the calculations of technical systems.
In contrast, the figure of Baptiste operates within a similar dynamic: his shifting forms oscillate between the organic and the insect-like, in a visual world reminiscent of Kafka's Metamorphosis. This drawing belongs to the series L'Autre, begun in 2007, where the line seems to unfold "beyond the artist", guided by a process that allows possibilities to emerge. China ink, used for a drawing of almost surgical precision, interacts with accidental gesture, giving rise to the unstable, living or evolving forms. The figure of Garance, meanwhile, occupies a point of equilibrium between these two poles, bringing a relational dimension that enriches the whole.
In this new body of work, drawing becomes a space for experimentation where, with every line, the question of "image-making" today is reexamined. This exhibition invites viewers to engage with the uncertainty and to recognize, in the very fabric of these fragmented "portraits of the century," the echoes of a humanity in flux.
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¹ These connections between images can be read like the pages of Aby Warburg's Atlas Mnémosyne, a reflection by Benjamin Bianciotto, "Divertimento", in Jérôme Zonder-Joyeuse Apocalypse!, exhibition catalog (Casino Luxembourg - Forum d'art contemporarin, 2023), Luxembourg: Casino Luxembourg - Forum d'art contemporain, 2024, p.37.
² Term used by Bernard Stiegler, drawing on the concept developed by Gilles Deleuze, during the roundtable discussion "Bernard Stiegler and Alain Damasio: Revolution or Bifurcation?", Gound Control, Paris, October 17, 2019.
