Jacques Lefebvre-Linetzky: Meaning beyond Meaning...
Very young, Jacques Lefebvre-Linetzky had a taste for drawing. Nourished by books by Shakespeare, Dickens, Conan-Doyle and Giono, this associate professor of English made a point of representing lines, glyphs and colors with incredible meticulousness at a very young age, to the point of using a magnifying glass for his creations. And since he is a man of many passions, let us mention in passing that this judo adept (black belt please) created the first cinema option at the Nice Academy by teaching students and teachers how to decipher an image and analyze a film.
Starting from the principle "that writing is drawing", Jacques Lefebvre-Linetzky developed a passion from his childhood for writing instruments such as Parker fountain pens. With these he gradually shrunk his letters, to the point of making them well-formed but tiny, forcing his teachers to some effort to decipher them. Then, it was the discovery of Rotring with fine lines, used by industrial designers. With this new weapon, the young Jacques drew while writing, unless it was the contrary, with the application of a monk bent over his scriptorium.
Let's discover some of the works taken from his book "Graphies" which has just been published by MB editions.
On the painting from the "Dismemberment" series, the signs placed in felt-tip pen on watercolor paper evoke Linear B of the tablets of the Mycenaean age, enhanced by the use of three colors. No need to be a modern-day Champollion to decipher this perfectly asemantic work, whose absence of objective meaning offers our imagination infinite fields.
In "Black wins", the four colors used drape the shapes in a more figurative approach, as if the writing were gradually giving way to a global image, in the dynamic search for a posture that is impossible to freeze. In this white prison, the signs interact, embrace each other or try to flee in a centrifugal temptation bounded by a virtual rectangle.
The two hourglasses filled loud and down (which prevents them from fulfilling their function) present obviousness which could symbolize the prisoner time, below, and the time "fled, at the top. This theme of prison and flight, already present in the painting" Black prevails ", is part of a multitude of signs, as so many grains of sand, each of which would have a visual or phonetic meaning, Egyptian hieratic.
As Jean-Claude Brun puts it in the preface he devotes to Jacques Lefebvre-Linetzky's book: how to give shape to time? The multiple answers appear in the pages of a book that I urge you to acquire.
Graphies
Jacques Lefebvre-Linetzky
MB éditions
Jacques Lefebvre-Linetzky's blog
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