“I got my first tattoos when I was 15, then I did it again. It’s my way of making myself acceptable,” says Jean-Luc Verna. Born in Nice, he taught drawing at Villa Arson in the 1990s and has had a retrospective at MAC/VAL in Vitry-sur Seine. He uses his body as part of his art. “My body isn’t a work of art, it’s a tool. I don’t do body art. Making up is part of my routine. It’s a bit of enhancement, because I don’t like the day-to-day,” he says. In some of the works here, the faces of heavily-made-up women emerge from the paper as if they had been crying or had just come off stage. In others, the artist stands naked in the pose of a Goya crucifixion or a Freddy Mercury concert.
Jusqu’au 7 janvier 2023
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By Tanja Stojanov