Jacques Monory - European Pop Art

Jacques Monory ( 1924 – 2018) was a French painter and filmmaker whose work, highly influenced by photography and cinema, is an allegory of the contemporary world with a focus on the violence of everyday reality. His canvases evoke a heavy atmosphere, pulling subject matter from modern civilization through the lens of his signature monochrome color blue.His work, along with the movement, was developed out of an opposition to the informal painting that typified the era. Not to be mistaken for Pop Art, Monory has said; “What has developed in France has moved away from American Pop Art, we have expressed a critical narrative of society while the Americans have almost always, in my opinion, embraced their system.”

The artist’s numerical painting titles and monochromatic color schemes, typically in his signature blue, act to distinguish his work within the movement. Many of his compositions are both drawn from and embedded with photographs of news media and film. He presents the ephemerality of media as cinematic sequences, occasionally appearing as painterly collages and others in diptychs and triptychs.