Jean Uroz begins by composing his works like collages, by assembling on a computer various found images, which collide and respond to each other until they resonate. Head-on collision between the European Middle Ages and timeless Japan, for example, Gothic illuminations and kimonos. The artist imposes a theme - it was for a long time the Western tales merged with classical Japan, it is recently the Sistine Chapel painted by Michelangelo - like a common thread that runs over dozens of works and several years . He creates in series, like a couturier sets up collections. It defines for a time a specific universe, within which each table refers to all the others, like so many facets of the same prism.

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Many of his painted works are thus inspired by the tales of the Brothers Grimm or Perrault, replayed by modern neo-geishas. We see Asian beauties with enigmatic smiles superimposed on scenes of medieval battles, where knights in armor kill each other with swords and spears. Two cultures and two distant eras, but similar in certain aspects, which respond to each other across time and space. King Arthur as a child identifies with the Emperor of the Rising Sun. We think we are dealing with an ukiyo-e print, before recognizing in the foreground an Alice tattooed with a kawai rabbit. The result is a feeling of mysterious balance in the union of opposites, between feminine and masculine, East and West, sensuality and violence, realistic painting and stylized drawing, modernity and antiquity, yin and yang.

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The paintings of Jean Uroz give off a feeling of calm and peace, softness and harmony. They open onto a dreamlike world, both realistic and deliberately outside reality. A strange but seductive universe, surreal but familiar, never scary. The decorative aspect assumed, the search for balance in composition, harmony in colors, aesthetic perfectionism or quite simply, the quest for beauty, this is also what fascinates the artist in classical Japanese culture. .

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From tales, he perceived the occult, alchemical meaning, the message both transmitted and hidden by symbols. His paintings are full of details, which must be taken the time to observe and decipher - there is what the eye sees, and behind, below, hidden meanings, superimposed, layers of successive interpretations, associations of ideas, double meanings. The artist is the sole holder of the keys. When he talks about his paintings, he opens certain doors. But, modestly, he sometimes prefers not to say too much rather than to reveal too much.

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Jean Uroz puts his impressive know-how and his proven mastery of pictorial techniques at the service of a quest for formal beauty and balance, elegance and aesthetic purity, innocence in the background. His art offers a refuge, in dreams of remote eras or distant cultures, as if to forget even for a moment the chaos and the loss of meaning of the contemporary world.

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Lars Kophal,

Freelance content writer and journalist