COLOGNE.- François Jacob carries painting through his canvases like a feeling, each one inscribed with an epic moment. Yet while the subject itself once determined this sense of the epic, it now increasingly recedes in favor of a concentrated engagement with the conditions of the image and of painting itself.

What is depicted remains present, yet loses its clarity. Figures, spaces, and situations appear less as narrative propositions than as stand-ins, as points of departure for painterly decisions. Color, surface, and composition partially detach themselves from the object and begin to develop a life of their own.

This becomes particularly evident in Jacob’s use of color. It no longer adheres to the boundaries of form, but moves beyond them, shifting contours and overlaying planes. Hard edges stand beside diffuse transitions. Pictorial spaces emerge that appear less coherent than folded, displaced against one another, or layered into each other. Within this, one senses an affinity to collage without the medium itself ever being abandoned.

The pictorial space remains intact while simultaneously being undermined. Perspective, construction, and the illusion of depth destabilize themselves through the very means of painting: through visible layers, suggested grids, distortions, and chromatically charged edges reminiscent of photographic overexposure or strong contrasts. Within this movement, painting gains a new immediacy. It does not merely show something, but reveals how this something comes into being. Gesture, trace, and surface move into the foreground and assert themselves as autonomous carriers of meaning.

Jacob pursues a form of painterly hedonism: a practice in which the sensual and material quality of the image is no longer subordinate to the motif, but placed on equal footing with it. Painting refuses unequivocal legibility in favor of an experience that moves between construction and dissolution, between assertion and deception. What becomes visible is, not least, the beauty of the unresolved. An image that exposes its own making and finds its strength precisely therein.





Jacob’s new paintings thus testify to a beauty that resides in the lie and illusion of every image. For every image ultimately remains a representation: not the subject itself, but its displacement into color, surface, and gesture. Painting lives through this beautiful deception. François Jacob plays with deception and disappointment by suggesting motifs while simultaneously revealing what underlies them: painting itself.

As Jacob renders the means of painting visible, the illusion does not disappear; it intensifies. It is precisely here that the “Beauty of the Lie,” as Jacob himself describes it, unfolds. Pigment becomes skin, light becomes memory, and surface becomes depth. This beauty of the lie reveals itself in every gesture of painting, even when it depicts something honest: one hand guiding another, people searching together for a source, a treasure, or intimacy. A profound sense of privacy seems to permeate the paintings, just as the colors themselves emerge with greater intensity, detach from their contours, and begin to oscillate.

Painting thus constantly attempts to show us something while often revealing more truth than visibility itself. François Jacob allows painting to disclose itself. In his works, reality transforms into something softer, stranger, and more filled with longing. The lie of painting is not a form of betrayal, but an invitation: to the gaze, to the imagination, to the desire not merely to see the world and the stories of a life, but to feel them anew. Thus, the beauty of its lie resides precisely in the moment in which, through its own revelation, it becomes something honest.

Elisa Mosch, 2026