Jean Dometti doesn’t paint to decorate walls. He paints to open up a passage, a space for dialogue between matter, memory and sensation. From 16 May to 15 June 2025, the Centre culturel Jacques Prévert in Mers-Les-Bains will be exhibiting 44 of the artist’s works based on a founding theme: the four elements. Earth, air, fire, water… so many forces that Dometti does not seek to represent, but to evoke, to make vibrate at the heart of the canvas.
Born in 1950, Jean Dometti grew up with the tremors of May ‘68. He began his creative career in the theatre, designing sets and costumes, before studying art and industrial design at the École Normale Supérieure de Cachan. There he rubbed shoulders with visual artists and designers, engravers and thinkers about visual space. Early on, he chose a challenging path: to make a living from art without depending on the market, and to teach in order to preserve the freedom to create.
His work is rooted in places – the Corsican mountains, cathedrals, ruined factories – but above all in their memory. Jean draws, engraves and paints what the place whispers to him. The material is a language and the artist is its translator. Wood, canvas, slate, hand-made paper… each medium carries a story that the artist reveals, expands, sometimes even carves out, as in his early engravings now on display at the Bibliothèque nationale.
The exhibition at Prévert is also the story of a turning point. In 2020, at the very beginning of Covid, Dometti was diagnosed with cancer. He spent six months in hospital, opening himself up to a new perception of life and a radical change in his painting. More light. More contradictions. More dynamism.
The elements saved me,» he confides. «I rediscovered the light.
We find this energy in his round canvases, a first in his career, where water rubs shoulders with fire, air swirls above the earth. He blends the organic and the abstract, the raw and the delicate, in a series that seems to float between the real world and the inner world.
An inhabited exhibition With 44 works, including 26 works on paper, mixed media and large format, the exhibition offers an immersion into a universe that is both intimate and universal. The scenography, conceived as a breath of fresh air, gives space to each work, allowing it to breathe, to question, to move the eye.
Dometti does not try to impose a discourse. He sets shapes, tensions and silences, leaving the viewer free to receive. A work,» he says, «is a triangle: the artist, the canvas, the gaze of the other.
With Dometti, nothing is set in stone. Art is movement, intuition and discovery. A constant dialogue between what has been experienced and what has yet to be invented. This exhibition is much more than an exhibition: it’s a poetic manifesto, an invitation to rethink our relationship with the elements, with places, with ourselves.
