BIOGRAPHICAL CATALOG OF THE MODEM'S COVERS AUTHORS

60 Modem Women’s Paris Fall-Winter 1998-1999 Cover by JEAN-CHARLES BLAIS 1998 CONTEMPORARY ARTIST Jean-Charles Blais (born in 1956 in France) creations are fundamentally influen- ced by the works of the so-called “affiches arrachées”, Arte Povera of Mario Merz and Pop-Art on which he has based all of his development as a modern artist. He studied at “École des Beaux-Arts” in Rennes. Since the early 1980`s Jean- Charles Blais studied the work of the “Nouveaux Réalistes ”, which guided him to the choice of materials used to carry the picture and marked his arrival into a new kind of painting. Blais builds his pictorial language on torn-off advertising posters which are stuck on the top of each other in multiple layers. Thus, the space articulated “behind” the surface is perceived as more vivid. The extraordinary way of using and creating representational motifs, figurative elements, houses and animals, plants and tools on the back, the incidental edges and creases creating associative structures make his work unique. Jean-Charles Blais `s numerous solo exhibitions in France, Germany and USA made him well-known to a larger audience during the eighties. In the 1990`s Blais presented his first large-scale work in a public space, when he was chosen to design the Paris Metro station “Assemblé Nationale”. In the middle of the nineties he was ready with his next project, the “Telephone Booths” which was exposed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. At the brink of the new century, Blais gets inspired with the digital technologies and new materials.