About Jade Moulin

Red tomato on white T-shirt

A huge fan of her work, the Patine team offered Jade Moulin carte blanche on the tomato theme. Challenge accepted, the tomato, an everyday object and still life painting, becomes timeless by coming to life on a canvas which Patine acquired for the Studio. Until a meeting in the flesh, here is a mini interview to discover a little more about Jade Moulin: the artist at work but make it tomatoes friendly.

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Patina: Tell us about your creative process?

Jade: The creative process is often the same, the painting at the origin of a photograph taken from life. I like the idea of a spontaneous, almost trivial image without any real justification. It is often a relation of texture, color or situation which has held my attention and which is added to a collection of images which will one day, or not, become a painting.

Patina: What conditions do you paint in? (what music, what outfits...)

Jade: I like to paint in the morning, when the ideas are still fresh from the night. Painting has an almost meditative side where you can listen to yourself think. Otherwise I often listen to podcasts, or music in comfortable clothes that don't fear any drips of paint and on which I can wipe my brushes!

Patina: Everyday objects are an integral part of your work, why and how do you sublimate the anecdotal?

Jade: Certainly out of a need to fix things before they disappear. I like to focus on trivial things that we no longer pay much attention to because they are so anchored in our daily lives. I always have a camera with me, or at least my phone, and as we would take notes in a notebook I collect images without ever looking at it for several months, I neglect them. After this settling time, I take the time to rediscover them to find out if some will become paintings. This raises questions for me about our relationship to objects, and to time, but also to our relationship to images. Today we are drowned in a continuous flow of images, I want, through painting, to offer an insignificant image another posture.

Patina: You also do photography: what advantage does painting have in the representation of everyday life?

Jade: I don't know how to explain how the choice of images is made which will evolve into painting, it's like that, and I like to preserve this part of the unknown. In this case, the relationship with the image is very different when I paint, I take time to observe its composition, I also break down the image in my head to know where I am going to start. Like a time of meditation on a suspended moment, as if I could extend time and fix it definitively through painting.

Patina: Let's talk little, let's talk carefully, what happened to the tomatoes that served as models?

Jade: The tomatoes came to decorate a lentil dahl!

“The shapes faded and were nothing more than a dream, / A slow sketch to come, / On the forgotten canvas, and which the artist completes / Only through memory.” A Carrion, The Flowers of Evil, Spleen and Ideal, C. Baudelaire

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Patina: What do you hope to provoke in the viewer? What are your expectations from the reception?

Jade: Nothing in particular except awakening a certain curiosity, so that we question our relationship to the things around us and to time. By taking the time to look.

Patina: What is the wardrobe essential that you wear tirelessly?

Jade: A pair of Birkenstocks.

Patina: What habit have you given up out of concern for the planet #noregretbutalittleallthe same (flying, cigarettes, McDonald’s nuggets, etc.)

Jade: Clothes that come from the other side of the planet, for several years now I have only worn second-hand clothes, or clothes made in neighboring countries. Without regret.

Patina: Your cuddly book that you will never part with?

Jade:At home-Mona Chollet