Jean Claracq

Jean Claracq (1991, France) paints miniatures and icons. His work creates a dialogue between traditional painting and the digital world, combining models drawn from social media with prominent references from art history, particularly the Northern European schools. Heavily focussed on traditional techniques, such as oil painting on panel, he portrays our relationship with screens and urban solitude with surgical precision. His works have been exhibited at prestigious institutions, including the Musée Delacroix, the Fondation Louis Vuitton, the Centre Pompidou-Metz, the Louvre-Lens and the X Museum in Beijing.

His residency project involves an archaeology of the future aimed at connecting antiquity to the contemporary by using the image of decay, a metaphor for the fragility of power. Drawing inspiration from the work of Martin Wong, the artist juxtaposes the dilapidated buildings of 1970s and 1980s Manhattan with the ruins of ancient Rome. For Villa Medici, he intends to create architectural fragments, halfway between models and paintings, in which imperial propaganda and contemporary advertising are juxtaposed. These installations superimpose everyday reality onto narratives of destruction, highlighting the persistent vulnerability of civilisations and the systems that generate them.