Jean-Philippe Delhomme, Model Resting Shelim, 2024. Oil on canvas/Huile sur toile. Photo: Tanguy Beurdeley Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.
Jean-Philippe Delhomme was a wildly successful illustrator working for magazines around the world before starting to show his paintings. Model Resting is his second show at Paris’s Perrotin Gallery. It is a colorful world of quiet contentment. An enchantment.
Model Resting Lea II, 2024. Oil on canvas/Huile sur toile. Photo: Tanguy Beurdeley. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.
Throughout history the genre of model painting has attracted a multitude of artists and models sitting in their studio - from Leonardo and John Singer Sargent to Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, all the way, more recently, to Kehinde Wiley. Studio painting of models belongs to the canon of the art, like still lives. The model patiently sits for the artist, wordless. Sometimes, the process takes months of the model’s life, sometimes these long sessions become a relationship.
Jean-Philippe Delhomme takes a radically different approach. Models come to his studio, but they don’t sit for him. They just read, lounge, lay on the floor, are free to just be. There is no staging of the portrait session. Delhomme is interested in recording the person, to paint the personality of the “non sitter”. The model can decide to be involved or not, to participate or not. The model is there, but it’s her as a human being that inspires Jean-Philippe Delhomme. It’s the person, not the form. His models are not professional models, simply women that he knows, friends he is curious about, mostly women. The sessions are usually quite fast - about 3 hours, and Delhomme never retouches the painting in the absence of his model.
This work, Model Resting, echoes another exhibition of the artist at the Perrotin gallery, in 2020, called Los Angeles Language, even though it was the opposite. In these paintings, humans were totally absent. It was Los Angeles at its most raw, just buildings as if you were driving around the city. His work evoked Ed Ruscha, William Eggleston or even David Hockney’s L.A., minus the swimming pools. In that series of 50 paintings, the city was empty and silent.
That quality of silence is so present in the new series, Model Resting. The paintings are a representation of what a peaceful mind looks like. They are in many ways the opposite of our noisy, cluttered world, it’s life off the never ending buzz of the social media world. We imagine the model sitting on the cold floor of the studio, a book resting on her stomach, happy to have this moment out of the world, observing the thoughts swirling in her mind while being painted by Delhomme, like in the portrait called “Shelim”. Model Resting also presents a series of delicate and poetic still lives that Delhomme calls “satellites of his portraits”. Also, sometimes, the same objects - books, flowers - are present in different paintings. For the painter, they act as shamanic objects, fetishes.
Born in 1959 in the Paris suburb of Nanterre, Jean-Philippe Delhomme started off as an illustrator, in the late 1980s. He was wildly successful, working for numerous magazines - GQ, The New York Times, Wallpaper, The New Yorker, Vogue, etc. - His advertising campaigns for New York super cool store Barneys attracted a cult following, like his so on point chronicles on the fashion and art world.
The work Delhomme does in his studio goes beyond observing a human being and trying to interpret it. Like Matisse and Hockney, the work is about color. “While the formats used for his subjects vary, all these paintings share the same sustained and very contrasting chromatic scale, with deep blacks in opposition to large flat tints of blue, orange, or green, recalling the treatment of color in the paintings of Henri Matisse or Alex Katz, two artists who have a particular place in Delhomme’s pantheon”, explains the art critique and curator Valérie Da Costa. Jean-Philippe Delhomme’s paintings would be perfect companions for a long meditation session.
~Jean-Sébastien Stehli
Jean-Philippe Delhomme. Dyed Flowers With Lunch Poems, 2024. Oil on canvas /Huile sur toile. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.
Jean-Philippe Delhomme. Model Resting. Until January 11, 2025. Perrotin Paris. perrotin.com
