Jacques Courtens' paintings are somewhat disturbing in that their conception and images go beyond the limits of our conception and our experience.

They cast the viewer in a universe where bliss coexists with torment, where anxiety, happiness and peace come and go. This is a universe where sensual pleasures enliven the body and mind of those figures now lying down or reclining, now skipping or dancing. It is a world where in a frenzied swirl of joy, sadness, insouciance and fright, life meets with death and joy with terror.

It is this very relationship of contradictory elements in the paintings which awake in the onlooker the means to explore space, adventure, magic and love.

Let us not forget that Jacques Courtens is not merely a creator of images burst out of his subconsciousness and then structured into rigorously formed and coloured identities but above all a painter with vibrant inspiration searching great depths for the truth, bringing the fruit of his search back from these unfathomable depths out into daylight.
This fruit, this peach is that of our obsessions, of obsessions that concern us all, which we hide, cover up, sublimate into mad desires.

Thus the work of Jacques Courtens is generated by a reclusive and ascetic conception of art; his vision makes him a prophet whose voice is not lost in the desert. Indeed we all listen to that voice because it shouts out our folly with the outmost esthetical logic.


Richard Audry,
journalist and art critic - 1979