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Artist uses color, lines to create subtle works

July 6, 2006 12:50 am

By DAVE SMALLEY

The woman wears a soft summer dress, with a delicate string of pearls draped around her exquisite neck. It's the kind of neck and collarbone that men dream about, the kind that launches ships, or wars.

Even better, she's getting onto a Vespa--the coolest, most suave Italian motor scooter ever (with apologies to fans of Lambretta). It's Audrey Hepburn in "Roman Holiday" done one better. You could fall in love with a woman like this.

But you can't see her face. This is one of the trademarks of a series of works by Jean-Francois Landeau.

Landeau's show, benignly named "Works on Paper," opens tomorrow night at LibertyTown Arts Workshop. Without resorting to hype, it's highly recommended. What the "Vespa" painting does for the imagination, so, too, do most of the large (24-by-36) studies of the human form in various ensembles.

One particularly nice work is the figure of a biker, cigarette smoke lazily drifting up, chrome and leather and white T-shirt marking a sort of timeless homage to rebellion.

Indeed, while this is certainly no retro-Americana appreciation show, there is in this Frenchman's paintings the occasional tip of the hat to a melding of fashion and the icon. Perhaps it's the eternal respect of the French for American pop culture.

Whatever the inspiration, it works.

One faceless figure wears a long raincoat, London Fog/Humphrey Bogart style. The lines, like all of Landeau's work, are a nice mix of fine and thick, and the color a combo meal of the bold and the delicate.

A series within the series, with pieces titled simply "Yellow Dress," "Pink Dress" and the like, reminds us of the unmatchable pairing of feminine form and the simple aesthetic of fabric worn simply and confidently.

Landeau's work goes beyond portrayals of figure, though. He also has a series of small, finely detailed pen and ink geometric drawings, intricate studies of lines that he calls his "Jet Lag" series. Each has four lines per 2-millimeter square, and lots of those squares put together make for an approach at once different and compelling.

If there's any downer to this show, it's a jealousy--here's a sophisticated, erudite Frenchman, a published author and holder of two doctoral degrees in economics (one from Harvard, no less)--and his first show is an over-the-wall home run. It's almost not fair. But since Landeau seems to be a nice guy to boot, we forgive him the success.

Astoundingly, the artist started painting seriously only in the new millennium, as a challenge. "I found my voice" in 2002, he said, with "Yellow Dress."

He's proud of that work for the simple reason that, for all its subtlety and use of color, it's done with only one tone of yellow, applied in different measure to create different hues.

And this was his first work?

Some things you don't want to be self-taught--your doctor, for instance. But in the arts, it's fair to say that inspiration and personal discipline count for as much as all the formal training in the world. Technique without a spark of vision can't light the fires of our imaginations. Landeau's work jumps off the paper with an inspired and confounding natural ability.

To reach DAVE SMALLEY:540/374-5430
Email: dsmalley@freelancestar.com