Jean-François BOCLE
Artworks
A fruit a Gun Photography
60 x80 cm
2023
Manifesto Bananero 1 Painting on paper
42x35 cm
2023
Manifesto Bananer 1 Painting on paper
42x35 cm
2023
Manifesto Bananero 1 Painting on paper
42x35 cm
2023
Manifesto Bananero 1 Painting on paper
42x35 cm
2023
Biography
Jean-François Boclé is an artist based in Paris. He was born in Martinique in 1971 where he lived for 17 years. He studied art at the École nationale supérieure d’art de Bourges (1992-95) and at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris (1995-98).
His work seeks to highlight the relationship of forces and violence that govern the functioning of our world since the first step of Cristóbal Colón on an island in the Bahamas. He thus tries to trace the path to the possibility of a "WE" that does not rest on the exploitation of "THE OTHER".
Much more, this "WE" invalidates all boundaries between endogenous and exogenous, it is crossed. This is how he considers his "etymological Cannibalism - Caniba, Cariba, Caribe: in the Caribbean, we know how to be crossed, by Caravels and the holds who followed, by banana cargo ships, by voluntary or wounded migrations, but also by cyclonic, eruptive, seismic, loas and orishas, all our tectonics is cannibalistic."1
For more than 25 years, Boclé has been marked by the historicity of violence. He constantly raises the question of what a memorial of the innumerable can be in the contexte of the Plantationocene.
"Fanon is the weapon, Boclé is the bullet. He can not be cataloged in a specific language, which is why it is very difficult to consider from the performance, the video, the installation or his drawings: I like to see him via the way which he materializes his devouring thought.(...) Although for many Caribbean artists and thinkers, resistance is an invested space when it comes to interpreting and defining the Caribbean, for Boclé resistance has ceased to be an option since its body functions as a kind of parangolé, where with his cannibal body, he goes through situations of violence, at the same time he is crossed by violence."2
Practicing poetry since the age of 15, since 2021 he has been writing prose (to be published by Éditions Dickersbach Kunstverlag / Protocollum Berlin): Les Chroniques de Mamoudzou (2021-2023), Les Chroniques Dakaroises and Les Chroniques de la possession.3 Boclé chronicle his everyday life, but also the meals he shares with friends, his interventions in prison, in a slum, in colleges, etc., very often wounded societies marked by the rubble. These chronicles will be published in French and English to break any language isolation.
1 - Jean-François Boclé
2 - Jaider Orsini, Colombian writer and curator, Artishock Revista, 2017.
3 - Mamoudzou is the capital of Mayotte (Indian Ocean). The Chronicles of Possession were written in Réunion (Indian Ocean)
Exhibitions
He participated to 13 international biennials. In Latine America / Caribbean like the Bienal Centroamericana (Costa Rica, 2016), the Bienal Salón (inter)Nacional de Artistas (Colombia, 2013), the Bienal de la Habana (Cuba, editions 2009 and 2012), the Encuentro Bienal di Caribe (Aruba, 2012), the Bienal do Mercosur (Brazil, 2011). Also in Asia like the 5th Kochi-Muziris Biennale (India, 2022) and the 4th Colombo Art Biennale, (Sri Lanka, 2016). On the African continent africain he took part to the Dak'Art Biennial (Senegal, 2016) and to the Subabiennale (Senegal, 2016). In Europe he participated to the 3rd Biennale de Nantes (France), to the Bienal de Pontevedra (Spain, 2010) and to the Thessaloniki Biennial (Greece, 2007).
Jean-François Boclé is represented in the public collection of the FNAC Fond National d'Art Contemporain and in private collections such as the Saatchi Collection. He was pre-sectioned for the construction of the Slavery Memorial at the Tuileries (Paris).