Jean Arcelin is a French and Swiss painter born in Paris in June 1962. He studied at Charpentier, a licensed art history school at the Sorbonne, where he developed an interest in seventeenth and eighteenth century painting. His paintings incorporate elements of false realism and figurative art, as well as some elements of Baroque.
His pictorial compositions are simply the results of his imagination without any cinematographic aids, using principally the oil canvas technique called "alla prima", keen to the original impressionist painters, which cancels the initial undercoated and glazed steps.
Arcelin uses references in order to create an effect, striving to make each painting a fully-fledged world. The spaces in the paintings are alive and are executed with rapid and spontaneous gesture. Painfully realized details create the sensation of rushing past the scene then coming to a complete stop. Landscapes edge with the urban sea, and combine with portraitist gesture. He takes corners of Paris, cafe chairs piled up in the angle of view of a monument, or the dressing room of a theatre, and portrays them empty of all human presence. His luminous depictions of interiors or landscapes are so charged that you can sense the personalities that inhabit the rooms or spaces, though they are absent.
Arcelin's painting is made up of intricate framework of fragmented memories nostalgically conserved. In the course of time these guarded recollections have been strengthen in hallucinatory perception of far off places and bygone days and then reminiscently unleashed upon the canvas. These phantom visions are well represented by the likes of Miroir et Piscine, Vue Cavalière , and of course L'escalier jaune: Every one of these interpretations distances itself profoundly from our visual certitudes, pressuring us to abandon all notions as to what is real and what is fictive.
Presented at the FIAC in 1993 and 1995, he participated in the Ebel sponsored Art and Culture in Basel and in Villa Schwob, Switzerland from 1990 to 1995 and exhibited in 1989, 1990 and 1999 at the Institut de France.
He created paintings on order for several major companies including Ebel watches (1990), Dom Ruinart Champagne (1992), Natixis Bank (2000) or Tiffany & Co. (2012, 2013) and has exhibited regularly in France, Switzerland and the US since 1990. He lives in Paris.
In 2007, the town of Bergerac in the Dordogne devoted a restrospective exhibition of 40 of his works at the Rectory Saint Jacques.
He is referenced in the Benezit Dictionary of Artists (Oxford University Press, 2010), in the Delarge dictionary of Arts (Gründ editions) (French: Dictionnaire des Arts Plastiques Modernes et Contemporains) as well as in the Swiss Who's Who.