Les portraits d’âmes de Jean-Baptiste Boyer

At the invitation of the Centre des monuments nationaux, the Château de Bussy-Rabutin is devoting its first solo exhibition to Jean-Baptiste Boyer outside the gallery. This young artist, now in his thirties, is both a painter belonging to the new school of French figurative painting, and as such, the creator of impressive representational portraits, as well as highly enigmatic and personal pictorial worlds.
The surprising and poetic dimension of his work lies in this contradiction.
Over the last ten years, Jean-Baptiste Boyer has painted portraits of his contemporaries as well as images and events that escape the social conventions of the time.
He depicts saints, criminals, witches or demons, opening a path to worlds in which the boundaries between reality and imagination become blurred. His painting represents the contemporary questions of his generation in the face of the complexity of the world.
Borrowing from Caravaggio's chiaroscuro tending towards tenebrism and from Goya's lucid view of his contemporaries and the dramas of his time, Jean-Baptiste Boyer, a fine connoisseur of historical painting, has created a contemporary work that mirrors his generation, made up of doubts, uncertainties and questioning about life and the afterlife.
The exhibition brings together more than 25 paintings chosen from over 200 works that the young artist has already produced. The exhibition invites visitors to an encounter with beauty, while revealing unfathomable and sometimes disturbing portraits of souls.
Many of the paintings from French and international private collections have never been shown before. They stand alongside one of the most moving collections of 17th century court portraits in the Château de Bussy-Rabutin.