Joël Brisse (1953)

Joël Brisse in his studio

Joël Brisse pieces of artwork - oil on canva

Artworks by Joël Brisse, from the exhibition “Le Jardin des Oliviers,” available at the gallery

Conversation between the Artist Joël Brisse and the Gallerist Catherine Pennec end of 2025

1. The title of the exhibition

Catherine : “Le Jardins des Oliviers” (“The Garden of Olives”) is a title that immediately resonates with the biblical story and Jerusalem. Is it a spiritual or symbolic reference?

Joël Brisse : First of all, it’s a pictorial reference, Mantegna for example. Three figures lying at the bottom of the painting and one standing higher up, facing the landscape. I tend to leave Christ out, to disrupt the reference. So there is a void in his place, and below, three unconscious figures since they are asleep. I feel that this strengthens the mystery, since Christ is a kind of answer. And that corresponds to my own thoughts: I don’t know if God exists or doesn’t exist, in front of me there is only emptiness. And of course, there’s also the biblical echo: this place of waiting, doubt, and solitude. The olive tree is also a tree of memory, of resistance (let’s not forget it was once called Palestine), of light. The garden becomes a metaphor for what concerns me in painting: a closed space where the image becomes denser.

Catherine : You also made a short film titled Les Oliviers in 2013. Is there a link between that film and this exhibition?

Joël Brisse : Yes, there’s a secret thread between the films and the paintings. The enclosed space is that of the tale, and the tale flirts with metaphor. The Mediterranean landscape is a setting for the two characters, much like in my painting where the subjects are often centered, as if enveloped by the space of the canvas. And there is the idea of return in Les Oliviers—the characters meet again and share stories. In my films, there is often a story within the story. This exists in painting too: a reference to the one that came before, from painting to painting in the painter’s journey, and also within an historical lineage. I clearly see a contradiction there: embracing a reference while also trying to blur it.

2. A double practice : painting and cinema

Catherine : You are both a painter, a screenwriter, and a filmmaker. How do these practices nourish one another?

Joël Brisse : What’s certain is that when I write a script, I have to see—it isn’t conceptual. I must see the characters, the places. After that, it’s all about compromise with the realities of filming. The narration progresses through events, small or large, which influence the following ones. In painting, I want people to feel that it tells something but not know what—that it’s an unutterable story. The subjects, immobilized in the material, often seem to be asking themselves what they are doing there. Perhaps they rub off on the characters in my films, who are indecisive, unstable, caught between two states (which is part of their strangeness). And when they do make a real decision, it can turn into a general blaze, as in La fin du règne animal.

Catherine : Your paintings are often large-scale, while your films are short films. Why this contrast in formats?

Joël Brisse : They can neither truly be compared nor opposed. Time is not the same. Time in painting is a revealed time, suspended, potential. It is the presence of what creates the image (even in abstraction) that gives the sensation of time. It’s there, it imposes itself on us, but it cannot be grasped. You see it all at once, yet it cannot be described, much less undone. Time in cinema runs away—you chase after it like a dog after a ball. And even when the rhythm slows, when nothing seems to happen, we feel time within us. It’s like reading or listening to music—you are carried through it. Unlike with painting, there’s no time to be looked at by the image.

3. Roots and territory

Catherine : You were born in Vichy, studied at the Beaux-Arts in Clermont-Ferrand, then lived for many years in Paris before settling in the Gard. How have these places shaped your path?

Joël Brisse : In Vichy I often wandered along the banks of the Allier, where the gaze escapes horizontally—it’s not a town where you sense labor, unlike Clermont, where you have to lift your head toward the Auvergne mountains to escape the Michelin factories. That’s where I understood that painting wasn’t just a pastime but a commitment within my reach. I absorbed every form and image I could at art school but also in all the city’s film clubs, especially that of the faculty of letters, which later became the Short Film Festival. Paris offered me decisive encounters, emulation, important exhibitions. And the Gard, today, is a refuge—a landscape, a light that nourishes my painting, but also a fertile distancing.

Catherine : The Musée Roger-Quillot and the FRAC Auvergne hold some of your works. Is it important to you that Clermont, your birthplace, keeps an institutional trace of your work?

Joël Brisse : Yes, of course, that too is a kind of return. It means that this territory, which saw me born and grow artistically, recognizes my work. It’s a precious continuity. But I give just as much importance to other collections elsewhere.

4. Artistic journey and vocation

Catherine : Where does your vocation as a painter come from? Were there artists in your family?

Joël Brisse : None at all—my grandparents were farmers in the Bourbonnais mountains, my father was a mechanic, and I had a zigzagging education, from remedial classes up to the baccalauréat. But I drew very early on, and I think I was fairly good at it, though no adult ever encouraged me in that direction. With drawing I needed no one—just a sheet of paper, a pencil to build a small world, to make something exist that didn’t exist. Quickly I thought there was no alternative—I couldn’t imagine working just to make a living. And what’s incredible is what happened after.

Catherine : And cinema—what led you to writing and directing starting in 1997?

Joël Brisse : I live with Marie Vermillard, who makes films. We’ve been together so long that you could say we grew up together. Naturally, we share a lot. We co-wrote her first scripts. But my involvement in cinema stopped there. Then she refused one of my scripts, and suggested instead that she help me film it. That film was called Les pinces à linge. And we kept going like that—me writing with her, her helping me with the shoots.

Catherine : Why did you choose to focus on short films?

Joël Brisse : Ah, there are several reasons. The short form suits me. You can’t say everything—you must convey the stakes, dramatize tiny things, stretch time until it resembles real time. You can caress a landscape or put actors in the dark and hear only their breathing, just a simple moment between them. A gesture can evoke their whole life. The short film is still very close to cinema’s origins—inventive, daring, poetic. Because cinema is also an industry, with commercial constraints even at the script stage. It’s difficult to remain free when you must tell a story with subjects, a tone, and a format calibrated to fill theaters.

5. Painting : formats, techniques, and approach

Catherine : You excel in large formats. Why do you feel more at ease on that scale?

Joël Brisse : I don’t like to just recite my lesson when I enter the studio—I like to be in a risky situation, asking myself how I’ll get through it. The large format allows me to be on equal terms with the canvas (a body-to-body encounter). It also means I can’t impose on it what it refuses—I must come to an agreement with it. There must be flow, even when everything seems in place. At some point it sets (like plaster), it’s there, and it surprises me.

Catherine : What techniques do you favor for your canvases?

Joël Brisse: For a long time I’ve painted in oil. It is less flexible to use, but it doesn’t contract when drying and long afterwards it looks as if it had just been applied. I also dislike when the surface shines and catches light reflections, so I use very little medium. Not many transparencies—the color is compact. No effects, no unnecessary textural research—the simplest, the basics of the technique.

Catherine : You once said that you work “against images, against their literality.” Could you expand on that?

Joël Brisse : Yes, I often start from one or several documents, but I try to go beyond the source images. I attempt to decontextualize them through formal work, in a raw, frontal manner, without effects, with a kind of deliberate clumsiness that gives them strangeness—as if they were caught in a mute zone, a kind of primal poetry. What matters is what escapes, what remains unsaid or unsayable. When I say it should set like plaster, I mean that suddenly it becomes silent. Silence is what creates intimacy with the viewer, and at the same time keeps them at a distance, makes them lose their footing in familiar terrain. That’s what removes painting’s literal (trivial) aspect, what makes the image resonate—I’m searching for something that lies behind the painting.

6. Looking toward the current exhibition

Catherine : What will the public discover in “Le Jardins des Oliviers”?

Joël Brisse : Canvases that question both memory and the present, beauty and unease. The living and the absent. This garden is an inner place, but also a collective one.

Catherine : What would you like visitors to take away from encountering your works?

Joël Brisse : It would be wonderful if painting could be an antidote to the madness of the world, to materialism, to the violent exhibitionism of social media, to frenetic consumption—the chance to listen to one’s inner silence. I feel like a naïve man without illusions who wants to promote a return to innocence.