Most of those who know him thought that Jean-Jacques Lebel had definitively abandoned painting and drawing. A meteor of the 60s, backed by Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst, he chose, after the events of 1968, to no longer go along with the rituals of the "one-man show": he was no less to continue, for himself, a pictorial activity. It is true that the ideological justifications of such a plunge into obscurity are dated by a certain style of subversion; we can think of them, however, as involving other reasons which I perceive for my own part as being about a personal methodology.

Jean-Jacques Lebel never painted in order to be an "artist-painter" but, in the great tradition of the surrealist cartographies, in order to construct himself through a work in progress. A process of auto-enunciation implying a traversal of heterogenous materials of expression and a transversality of aesthetic, social, affective etc. practices. It is less a matter here of establishing the territories of the Ego than of contributing to the realisation of virtualities borne by a multitude of "for-others" assailing subjectivity in the fluxes and refluxes of an era. And we should emphasise that, in this process of the efflorescence of the virtual, the technological mutations, especially those of means of communication, will come to play a primary role. It is visible in these canvases, with the use of video and polaroid as intermediary links in its three-dimensional elaboration [l'Èlaboration plastique], but it was also already quite obvious, in the other registers of expression in favour of which Jean-Jacques Lebel consecrated much energy, the happening, performance and sound poetry. In the large international events that he organised in Paris, Milan, Venice and New York -- Anti-Process (1960-61), The Festival of Free Expression (1964-67), Polyphonix (1979-88), War on war (1982) -- he always brought together exhibitions of painting, cinema or video, poetry in all its forms, the most diverse music and, of course, happenings.

Jean-Jacques Lebel remained faithful to the mad ambition of an era which claimed to decompartmentalise art, science and life in order to make them interact at all levels of subjectivity and social life, in such a way that his work, fortunately preserved from the influence of the fashion of the day and the clash of groups and factions, is today returning to the nascent state like a pointer stretched towards the present time: are they or not in a position to be revived to the point where such a problematic would once again be current? But the question persists in a more complex and subtle way. At the cost of what distillation, and requiring what supplement of problematic intelligence and sensibility could it be reborn and release us from the ice age that we have been passing through since the beginning of the 80s?

The two complementary sicknesses of the 60's counter-culture were, on the one hand, putting too much emphasis on the social to the detriment of the molecular texture of the desires involved in the infra-personal economy of individuals and, on the other hand, misjudging the constraints relative to effectively taking the sphere of political interests into account in favour of an often muddled exaltation of spontaneity. Jean-Jacques Lebel precisely never fell into these traps: social action remained inseparable for him from poetic action and, despite his repugnance at the reigning bureaucracies, he did not hesitate to become politically active when the coming of the left to parliamentary power gave hope to the opening up of new spaces of liberty for artistic creation. It is significant that at intervals of fifteen or twenty years we discover in his work the same thematic of the emergence of forms which are immanent to the pictorial form. This is not a matter of the repetition of identical "subject matters" but of the constant search to turn enunciation inside-out [un retournement de l'Ènonciation]. All these canvasses literally swarm with sexualised eyes, or of seeing sexes, but whose virulent energy never has a univocal status. We can experience this effect by moving back from each canvas: past a given threshold vision changes direction and, through a "Gestalt" effect, all these "partial objects" lose their fractal consistency, cease to be seen as provocative oddities in order to transform themselves into a fascinating icon-gaze, pursuing the watching subject beyond the immediate perception that he can have of them.

Another possibility: the turning of each canvas around on each of its four sides which would only confirm the fascinating consistency of the form once it becomes global. Whatever angle is adopted, we rediscover the will to form a conjunction in a single point of fusion of three doublets which until the present only a few practitioners of the plastic arts had tried to make work separately: that of painting and writing, of painting and collage and of writing and collage. Through these zones of imbalance, enunciation tends towards the enigma of a being-there of life, death and sexualised machines before any crystallisation of "ready-made" significations. Jean-Jacques Lebel's tour de force consists in making these canvases function like so many shamanesque moments without them ever departing from an ironic and humorous distance.

Felix Guattari
Paris 1988