To see this faces and hear the music that enlightens them. Born in the cotton fields long ago, it is this roving warm complain still rising to us. Jean-Paul Pagnon is painting this music. Do not look for well-known faces ! They are the soul of blues and jazz. The same music flows in their blood. Eternity is their common link.
Can you imagine the mind of a mutifaceted Billie Holiday behind the détail of Hula Girl ’s face or Celia ? Haunting, obsessing Billie Holiday overwhelming Jean-Paul Pagnon to such a point that he untiringly summons her to appear in all his feminine portraits. « This voice, he confesses, I’ll never get over it ».
Whith his long pale hands, Jean-Paul Pagnon paints black skins with an almost green glint, life-seamed faces, he says… His world puts together green-gowned singers, chromium-plated microphones, saxophones and guitars. Standing in the foreground, they all appears as principal characters. His paintings are as warm as a steaming coffee cup, as sweet as a hot chocolate, recalling the curling smoke of a cigar from Havana and the sweaty summer in Louisiana...
It emanates from them the America of old days, far from us, in a ideal and fantasy world, this America printed on advertisements with its smooth outdated colors. A ghost-like America… Has it ever existed ? Jean-Paul Pagnon gives colours to this unqueched dream, takes the hand of the unlooker we become at the sight of this american mirage, and he plays with his pictures its everlasting sound track, that of Jazz and Blues myth.
Marie-Albane Laugier
J-Paul Pagnon's paintings are in many collections in France, USA, Holland, Swiss, Luxembourg and Austria.
