Jean-Claude

GÖTTING

Jean-Claude Götting est un auteur de bande dessinée, illustrateur, dessinateur et peintre français, Jean-Claude Götting is a French comic book artist, illustrator, draughtsman and painter, born in Paris in 1963. In 1986, while still a student at the Arts Appliqués Duperré in Paris, he published Creve-Cœur, his first comic book, with Futuropolis. After several other titles, he turned to press and publishing illustration, as well as painting. His paintings are exhibited in Paris, Geneva and Brussels, in particular at the Huberty & Breyne gallery, with whom he participates in the BRAFA, Art Paris and Art Elysées international art fairs. 

He is the author of numerous novel covers (notably for the French edition of the Harry Potter series), several collections of drawings, and books for young people. He collaborates with newspapers and magazines such as Libération, Elle, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Jazzman, Lire... and occasionally offers his illustrations to major brands such as Chanel, Piper Heidsieck and Nicolas. 

2004 marked his return to comics. Since then, he has published La Malle Sanderson, Happy Living (Delcourt), Pigalle 62-27 with Loustal, Watertown (Casterman) and Nouveaux Détours (Barbier). In 2017, he directed his first animated short Tapas Nocturnes, followed the following year by Un café noir, selected in Stuttgart, Geneva and Montreal. 

What's striking about Götting's canvases is his use of large flat tints in B/W or color, the light that emanates from contiguous layers of paint, the false awkwardness of his gesture and the melancholy of his subjects - especially his female subjects. The atmosphere of certain scenes intrigues and prompts the viewer to imagine sibylline narratives: what is Eve thinking in front of her typewriter? And what is this woman, lying fully clothed on a bed in La chambre jaune, going to do with her night? What might the letter she holds at arm's length contain? Götting portrays lonely women, elegant and distant, with soft features marked by thick blacks, who read, write, contemplate and reflect - on the march, perhaps, of some stolen reality? 

The artist never gives away the key to his stories, but subtly suggests to the viewer that, in art, a glance is an opening onto the world. In the words of Marcel Proust, “only through art can we step outside ourselves, to know what another sees of this universe which is not the same as ours, and whose landscapes would have remained as unknown to us as those which may exist in the moon”. Götting's paintings take us as far as Proust's words.