Jean Claracq and the 2021 Roland Garros poster

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Waiting Line, 2020 (detail; the full painting is 16 x 23 cm)

Jean Claracq is a young artist whose work I first came across at the Sultana gallery in Paris and at a couple of institutional group exhibitions. Then, when I went to an open day at Le Houloc, a studio in the Paris suburbs shared by nearly 20 young artists (invited by the amazingly dynamic Célia Coëtte), I had the good fortune to meet him and was able to visit his studio space there.

He often works on a small scale, and thus sometimes combines contemporary content with references (direct quotations or not) to medieval manuscripts, portrait miniatures such as Hilliard's, the details (landscapes, perspectives, distant cities, forests, skies...) of renaissance art, and oriental painting of, e.g., Iran's negargari tradition.

When I visited Le Houloc, as I take an amateurish interest in Iranian art, I was interested to see he was working on a small painting, at that time just sketched out, to be called Waiting Line (above). It shows modern western figures, including a family of tourists, queuing in a Persian landscape. When it was eventually finished, it was shown in an October 2020 exhibition called Masculinités at Sept Elzévir, in the Marais, so I was able to see the final version there.

Jean Claracq with his Roland Garros poster design. Photo Christophe Gibbaud / FFT

More recently, back at Sultana, he had a solo show you can 'visit' here on the gallery's website, with a press release in French and English, where I noticed that in one of the works he'd incorporated a startling 'revamp' of the Naqsh-e Rostam rock tombs near Persepolis.

I've been pleased over the past couple of years to see his work attracting quite a lot of attention. Here's a link to a France Culture radio feature in French; and here's a short but pertinent text about him published in English.

I just found out, from an Instagram post, that Jean Claracq was invited to design the poster for this year's Roland Garros French tennis open. In the following YouTube clip, subtitled in English, he talks about the poster project, and about his work in general.


And finally, a photo of Jean Claracq's Waiting Line on show at Sept Elzévir in October 2020:


Postscript: as part of FIAC hors-les-murs, during the 2021 fair, Jean Claracq was invited to exhibit at the Delacroix Museum in Paris.


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