Jean-Marc Dallanegra

"I like to make vibrate what seems empty. The journey from one place to another, what makes the road, the ground, the sky. Too often only the place of arrival seems to count, from which everything is expected, where everything must happen. I like to make exist the landscape in flight of these erased moments of non-existence." J.-M. D.

Roads that go on forever. Close-up wide angle, panoramic. Jean-Marc Dallanegra paints roads. With or without cars. Never the same. Most often giving the impression of being at high speed on a long ribbon of bitumen. He travels. In France, in Germany, in Spain, in the United States, in Italy, in Lebanon... He shoots with his camera, before painting with oil and knife.

After graduating with honors, Jean-Marc Dallanegra spent three years at the Beaux-Arts, was fired and then decided to cross the Sahara from North to South. With him, a friend, an old marabout, and five camels carrying two hundred kilos of painting material.
There, he had a trigger.

"Like a communion with the living earth. It was crazy, after walking for hours and hours, days and days, my mind was literally empty, and I felt - suddenly - the living force of the ground, of the Earth - with a big "T" - under my steps. It is his moment, I think, that pilgrims seek, that they search for, that they reach on their journeys." J.-M. D.

Since then, Dallanegra wants to share this sense of "belonging" to the Earth with those who no longer have (almost) any contact with it. And who drive, without feeling, in a car, swallowing the kilometers.

"I want to paint the reality of my time, where the man on foot has disappeared, where he has created a second physical envelope: his car. I would like people to be happily aware of this place and time when they look at my paintings, to remember that they are alive." J.-M. D.