The Studio

For the last ten years, artist Jean-Philippe Delhomme, known for his previous collaborations with famous brands and magazines, has been  concentrating only on his fine art practice. With "The studio" Isetan is showing three never seen recent paintings, made at the artist studio in Paris Montparnasse, models posing and still life and portraiture: a direct observation of the subject, not mediated by photography, executed in one time painting sessions. A Delhomme painting is a capture of the Here and Now, be it a fleeting atmospheric moment of a landscape under changing light, the temporary presence of the model in the studio or the effortless composition of a still life.

In the exhibition The Studio Delhomme presents a series of recent and new oil on canvas that invite the viewer into his Parisian studio, located in a Montparnasse landmark building that has housed artists since its construction in 1927.

Still life, juxtaposing the ephemeral beauty of blooming flowers with the perennial presence of art books point toward the conceptual dimension of painting practice and designate the studio as a mental space where personal time and history collapse. By contrast to the solitary experiences of still life, the portraits enact the studio as a carefully staged theater of human interactions, paced by the exchange of gaze between artist and model. The theatrical aspect is reinforced by the props that transform the atmosphere of the studio and sets different moods. For instance, the solid color wall backgrounds against with the models sit, the bright strips of a Mexican blanket, the cloth covering the sofa. The models however presents themselves with a certain neutrality, wearing their own clothes in an act that evokes more an audition or a Warhol screen test than a dramatic performance. A number of painting depict the specificity of the space especially the large windows as a membrane between exterior city life and suspended studio reality.

An influence on Delhomme’s approach of painting as representation or as a form of realism can be traced to French literary theorist and semiotician Roland Barthes (1915 - 1980), especially his lessons on the concept of “Neutral”:

"Any inflection that dodges or thwarts the paradigmatic, oppositional structure of meaning has been defined as belonging to the Neutral, and therefore aims at the suspension of the conflicting givens of the discourse. [.] We tried to make it understood that the Neutral did not necessarily correspond to the flat, fundamentally depreciated image that the Doxa has of it, but could constitute a strong, active value. » (Roland Barthes - Le Neutre, Cours au College de France 1978 / editions du Seuil, Paris 2023)

About Jean-Philippe Delhomme -

Jean-Philippe Delhomme’s painting's practice was developed in parallel to a successful career in the field of press and communication. He only began to exhibit his paintings in 2017. After graduating from Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Art Décoratifs in 1985, Delhomme chose printed media over studio for its potential to reach a large public. He has contributed for over thirty years to publications worldwide, worked with brands, notably his collaboration with Glenn O'Brien for the Barney's ad campaign in the early 90s, and published a number of books combining illustrations and his own writing (The Cultivated Life, The Unknown Hipster diaries, Artists’ Instagrams ). The reflective and solitary experience of painting the real has slowly imposed its rhythm and implacability over the social commentary on style and culture. Painting is now the main focus of his activity. Recent exhibitions include Musee D'Orsay, Paris, Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles. In parallel to the Isetan presentation he will exhibit at Perrotin Tokyo a series of new portraits under the title Visage(s). Paintings, a monograph, was recently published by RVB books, Paris.