L'EVIDENCE DU PRINTEMPS: JEAN MILO

JEAN MILO:  L’évidence du printemps

Abstract

Only wanting to be, above all, himself, he was looking for an intimate complicity with matter, ran away from conceptual asceticism, fed on carnal contact with the world, avoiding the automatism of a lyrical abstraction made of repetition, reflexes and habits, for the benefit of a constantly renewed, spontaneous and profuse experimentation. Invigorating his painting with poetry and literary activity, his work is percolated by music, the music of words as well as notes, a soundtrack to the joviality he bestowed upon the canvas.

The exhibition devoted to Jean Milo organised by La Patinoire Royale – Galerie Valerie Bach adheres to the gallery’s tropism towards Belgian art and particularly Belgian painting, subsequently to the great Painting in Belgium exhibition (2019), which had largely reminded the public of its existence.

As a painter – poet or poet-painter he escapes classifying, and gives to see a carnal and thrilling emotion that deeply penetrates reality, uncovering its hidden sense. His work is therefore initiatory, in the meaning of a necessary progression of emotions, a kind of savage domestication that slowly makes us discover a complex and coherent pictorial grammar, which helps unveil the implemented secret in a progressive fulfillment of our pleasure in accessing his own apprehension of the world.

Like a flower that would blossom all year long, Milo’s work illustrates, throughout his entire painting career, a linear and continuous spring bloom that radiates and never declines. Driven by an instictive, almost vital necessity, the act of painting taunted him relentlessly, everyday and everywhere. As with Bonnard, Dufy, Matisse or his own friend Tytgat, at the heart of his creation lies a constantly boiling reactor of shimmering, harmonic colours in which a sparkling ode to joy and an inexhaustible expression of merriment and life are blended.

Milo’s pantheist work celebrates optimism and the organic complexity of nature, to which it is totally dedicated. He never followed any trend but walked along his century, experimenting fauvism, cubism, expressionism, lyrical abstraction and action painting, culminating in what was rightly called « abstract impressionism ». A man of his time, he lived in and alongside modernity, never looking for success or commercial complacency, treasuring the magic and innocence of childhood.

— Valérie Bach & Constantin Chariot, translated from French by Laurent Willema