Jean-Claude Bélégou 2000/2004 La revanche de la chair

a disembodied and hyper-technologically technologically advanced world, a society of surveillance and control, profitability, supervision and commodification of all human activities (work, thought, consumption, sexuality, reproduction, culture, leisure) where deliberately neo-structuralist discourses (evacuation of the human, of the flesh, of subjectivity, of interiority) and socio-reformist discourses with documentary pretensions dominate in the field of art, The flesh, in its affirmation of irreducible individuality and vitality, dynamism, and solitary consciousness, are undoubtedly the last possible places of resistance to "totalitarian liberalism". Jean-Claude Bélégou's photographs since 2000 are thus dominated by a radical, and therefore tragic and Dionysian, pessimism, which on the formal level his return to the medium format colors of his beginnings makes more than ever marked by the heritage of the history of art, the heritage of the pictorial history as well as that of the history of photography, and the preoccupation with the "painting" conceived as an object, not of communication (for communication there are the media) but of contemplation and meditation.
In a relative enclosure, with great freedom of spirit, refusing any ideological instrumentalization of art, he continues his work in digitized color film photography, a carnal work marked in its form by a certain naturalism always preoccupied with a quest for the intimate, that is to say the most interior feeling and thought of beings and things that are close to it. Affirming the irreducibility of the flesh, of its composition as well as of its decomposition, is thus an ultimate emergency, a measure of health, where there is nothing more to expect from the living.
He has been represented since 2001 in Paris by the Galerie Pierre Brullé.
In 2005, he took part in the exhibition Paris à Shanghai, the third generation organized by the Maison Européenne de la Photographie.
The entire cycle was shown for the first time at the Château d'Eau, in Toulouse, in July 2009
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