PARIS.- Ten years after the artist’s first exhibition at the gallery, Jean-Michel Sanejouand. Real Spaces, Imaginary Spaces brings together two significant bodies of work: Calligraphies d’humeur [1968–1978] and Espaces-Peintures [1978–1986]. Several of the works on view were previously included in the artist’s retrospective exhibitions at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lyon in 1986 and at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1995. These two milestones provided crucial institutional recognition to a career guided by its own internal logic in which each series paves the way for the next, allowing it to emerge in a new form.

While emphasising the foundational role of the 1968–1986 period, the Art : Concept exhibition also highlights the transitions, ruptures and continuities that have shaped Jean-Michel Sanejouand’s thinking and practice. Throughout his career, he has continually reinvented his relationship with space — real or imaginary — questioning its definition and organisation through different media. His ‘techniques of space’, in which painting plays a central role, serve as revelatory tools for spaces whose boundaries are sometimes difficult to discern, engaging both our awareness and our entire physical presence.

The Calligraphies d’humeur appeared in the late 1960s alongside his Organisations d’espace and in opposition to the conceptual art canons that dominated the period. Their first exhibition in 1974 at Galerie Germain sparked incomprehension in the art world, where figuration was viewed with suspicion or even rejected. At the same time, Bad Painting emerged in the United States as a reaction to this conservative attitude. Breaking with this trend, Jean-Michel Sanejouand felt the need to take up the brush again. He let caricatural, often erotic figures appear in India ink, which he himself described as “grotesque and aggressive.” The Calligraphies d’humeur reveal an imaginary space that offered the artist some breathing room from the geometric rigor he was developing in the public sphere. On paper or canvas, the characters always stand above a continuous line. This minimal horizon, which cancels out any perspective, creates a stage, a threshold between reality and fiction that seems to give new expressiveness to the Théâtre de Guignol. This quick gesture, which allows no reworking, turns the piece into a diary. Each Calligraphie condenses a specific mood whose title records the moment. These works form a distanced commentary on society, a theater of the unconscious, both personal and collective, where satire fuels a critical tension.

In the late 1970s, the final Calligraphies d’humeur foreshadow the Espace-Peinture, of which they seem to be the formal and poetic origin. Mostly in black and white until then, these works soon became saturated with bright colors, and their horizon thickened until it became a mountain base. Starting in 1977, they revived the central question: what is a painting?

The synthesis between real space and imaginary space takes place in the Espace- Peinture. When he agreed to “paint again,” Jean-Michel Sanejouand produced large-format works in which figure and mental landscape merge. The frame of the painting becomes fertile ground for the creation of a fantasized world where colors, reliefs, lines, and planes reconcile conceptual activity with manual practice. The first works in the series are described by the artist as Organisations d’espace that are completely impossible to realize. Hills, trees, or streams, reduced to simple lines or monochrome surfaces, stand beside geometric forms that neutralize any illusion of representation. The suspended shapes interact rhythmically with emptiness in a space that has become arbitrary. From 1982 onward, perspectives multiply, contradict one another, and the landscapes seem to implode. Far from a nostalgic return to painting, this marks a way of confronting the space of the canvas after long bypassing its rules with the Charge-Objects (1962–1968).

The exhibition Jean-Michel Sanejouand. Real Spaces, Imaginary Spaces highlights the coherence of a body of work that is often perceived as changing, yet is driven by profound rigour — that of making space a tool of thought that should be approached with complete openness. From Calligraphies d’humeur to Espaces- Peintures, signs, forms, and voids interact to reveal the invisible structures of images. The artist’s freedom is evident in the precision of his gestures and the distance created by irony. His work cannot be categorised or reduced to a set of classifiable objects; like an enclosed place, it is defined as much by its limits as by its contents, and human experience is what delineates its contours.

Ida Simon-Raynaud