The Sensual Stillness of Reverie: Eroticism and the Poetics of Suspension in Jean-Claude Besson-Girard

Jean-Claude Besson-Girard’s art lives in a state of suspended time, not ecstasy, not consumption, not seduction, but a hushed interval before all decision. His models do not perform eroticism, rather they simply exist in the tremor of their own interior lives. This makes him fundamentally different from pornographic impulse and fundamentally aligned with the symbolic erotic tradition of Balthus, Pierre Bonnard, Félix Vallotton, and also, in a more photographic, dream-photochemical language, of David Hamilton. All of them work within a single metaphysical obsession: Eros as the dream before awakening, the erotic as the inner temperature, not outward offering.

Fig.1  Jean-Claude BESSON-GIRARD, Untitled 24 (2019)

Fig.2  Jean-Claude BESSON-GIRARD, Untitled 43 (1984)

Absorbed Women

Besson-Girard’s women are not posed but absorbed; in music, on beds, in private gardens, in private thoughts, in dreams, in mirrors that do not return a voyeuristic echo but a metaphysical solitude. These bodies are neither aggressive nor inviting, they have not even fully realised that they are being seen. There is always wistfulness in their eyes, let us just look at the woman in Fig.1. or Fig.5. He paints exactly that paradoxical psychological point where the woman is aware of herself, but not yet aware of the effect she is having on the viewer, or on a man. This is why the erotic is unbearable, because it is not yet a performance. It is the phenomenology of being before being-for-the-other.

Fig.3  Jean-Claude Besson-Girard, Untitled 12, 2018

Fig.4  Jean-Claude BESSON-GIRARD, Untitled (Nu au ciel jaune), 2017

The Ebony Tower

And this is also where David Hamilton’s famous, contentious soft-focus photographic universe operates. Contrary to reductionist readings, Hamilton is not aestheticising ‘softness’ for nostalgia; the gauze is ontological. It places the viewer at a distance not of desire but of delay. His girls are seated, resting, in a faint state of reverie: brushing hair beside a window, caught in midsummer golden dormancy, neither resisting nor inviting the gaze. Desire is not yet event, it is dew. What we witness is not sexuality but its temperature. Another reference that comes to mind while gazing at Besson-Gérard’s young women with lithe bodies and blonde hair is John Fowles’ novella ‘The Ebony Tower’.

Fig.5  Jean-Claude BESSON-GIRARD, La fin d’un monde 2 (2018).

In the extended Premium version of the article you'll learn more about the relation between Fowles’ The Ebony Tower’ and Besson-Girard's work, the "Besson-Girard/Hamilton" aesthetic connection, Besson-Girard's feminine eroticism, his portrayal of women, more arousing artworks, and MORE...!

Click HERE for the pubescent girls and Japanese cats of Balthus

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