Jean Michel Poveda and the Memory of Trees.

Viewed from a certain perspective, a tree is a mysterious thing. Its bark, furrowed with dry wrinkles, bears imprints, writings, esoteric messages from nature. Here, the poet seeks the markers of his identity, the marks of his destiny… Jean-Michel Poveda finds himself reflected. His painting style is captivated by it. From the bark, he learns the brushstroke. The sinuous grooves through which he creates the figures of his works, he carves with color. The oil paint works its magic. After a more conventional approach to painting, Jean-Michel Poveda, by reflecting on tree bark, has become someone else.

In small and medium formats, such as the phasmids of tropical regions, his subjects appear to be concealed within the painting.
A "flat fish." Its vertical position and the green color framed in dark green and highlighted with white give it depth. Displayed in a decorative manner, it evokes a Mediterranean atmosphere. One thinks of arabesques. The imagination delves into the clay, searches, travels, connects the elements. It allows itself to be drawn into an absurd yet highly suggestive game of memory. It recalls the plates of Nabeul, the mashrabiya screens… The whole takes on a picturesque, votive air.
Tree bark passed through the sieve of paint… The eye remains suspended between two states of accommodation.

The title of this series is none other than " The Memory of Trees. "... As if the variety of forms in the world could be read from the skin of a tree.
It can also be read in coffee grounds. Leonardo da Vinci saw things in the shapeless stains and variegated stones of the walls. Landscapes, mountains, trees, battles, figures with lively gestures, strange faces and costumes.

The microcosm of the mark, of the fortuitous form, is known to the masters of the brush. They find there the spirit of drawing. From the primordial trace on the blank canvas, senseless graphics reflecting the world.

In Jean Michel Poveda's painting entitled "The Eye," the artist uses browns reminiscent of the color of turned earth. Continuing in this spirit of bark-like canvases, the black eyelid, to which he adds the iris, subtly alters the natural features. As if after a minor surgical procedure, the Cyclopean eye begins to vibrate.

In "Agony," "Oppression," and "Creature," the painting appears as interlaced, outlined forms. Expanded, the abstract figures read like stones at the bottom of a riverbed. From a formal perspective, these works constitute the beginning of a new series subsumed within the series on the memory of trees. Unlike "Flatfish" and "The Eye," they explore abstraction for its emotional power. They are states of mind.

Other works, such as "The Wise Man with the Big Nose," "The Visitor," and "Metamorphosis," are more narrative. They are also more fluid. Their dramatic structure is immediately apparent. In "Awakening of Desire," a spectral female body emerges from the mottled colors of pink, blue, white, and black. In this canvas, the tree bark, the matrix of the series, is forgotten. In "A Family," it is different again; a tripartite form, gathered in on itself like a terracotta figurine against a rough, dark green background, hints at the artist's affinity for sculpture.

In its formative stages, Jean-Michel Poveda's paintings, directly inspired by tree bark, explore diverse themes, reflecting the artist's personal questions. His pictorial observations of reality, as well as his projection of invisible things onto the canvas, imbue it with poetry and transform reality. This, too, is what painting is about.

Ileana Cornea, July 2006