Edinburgh Festival Exhibition Featuring

the work of Jacques Marzan




In my past work, Homology, Faceless, Cut from The same Cloth, to name a few series, I tried to tread
the line between figurative and non-figurative. They consisted of my attempt to represent the human
being, but not the "the figure" as it is usually meant in art. Not having the urge to fully adopt
Giacometti's Figure as a structure or Bacon's figure as a body to name only two principle modes, I was
searching for a different path. Later, being more in tune with my proclivity I found myself engulfed by a
passionate journey which made it clearer to me; I was naturally driven to work with the notion of a
figure as the parameters of the self, as well as in how it relates to its surrounding space, to gravity, to
entropy and to the crowd. Over a series of works, I have developed a semi-schematic representation
of a figure (figures) as a sort of homunculus - half fetus, half man/woman. In other works I used
likewise schematic renderings of skulls and heads. The attempt was to express the relationship of the
internal and organic human state to its current outer reality.

"His art should be scrutinized and absorbed slowly; he is not one of those one need talk about in a
hurry. His work is long and slow and at whatever moment one turns to it, it will always offer, as Rainer
Maria Rilke wrote about the work of a contemporary painter in 1905, "an ample reason to talk about
the most crucial and fundamental things in art". It challenges our eyes and our perceptions the way
darkness does. When your eyes become accustomed to it you could discover more than what was
visible at first. The interplay of negative and positive spaces in the paintings of Homology could be
riveting when captured in a split second of stillness..."

Stav Efrat, New York freelance art critic - used to write for former Kav and Studio art magazines.

"As an artist living and working in New York I was intrigued and influenced by the city's urban
immensity, multiculturalism and complex diversity in all respects. Homology portrays the fundamentals
of my outlook on life: the comparison of contrasts, the mix of feminine and masculine, birth and death,
negative and positive spaces, the blurred distinction between entities and the crucial question of where
something starts and where it ends."


Jacques Marzan
Edinburgh Festival, 2003
Homology: Selected paintings
Oceans: Multimedia projection
16 mins. Multimedia projection of digital images


Apex International; Edinburgh International Festival, UK