BIOGRAPHY
Jean-Louis Bessède is a French artist renowned for his talents as a painter and designer. He is known for using various means of artistic expression to bring matter to life and extract its soul. His work is characterized by a spiritualist approach, seeking to explore the inner being and self-knowledge. His contemporary paintings feature creatures that, although static, seem to come to life through his art.

The influence of spiritualism is evident in Jean-Louis Bessède's work.
His artistic approach aims to “make matter speak, extract its soul, sublimate it, spiritualize it.” This approach is in line with the tradition of French spiritualism, which seeks to explore inner experience and freedom of the spirit. Bessède uses exalted gestures reminiscent of “magical-religious” or shamanic rituals. This approach reflects the spiritualist quest for profound truth and original consciousness, as emphasized by the 19th-century spiritualist movement. His works feature anonymous figures and “mythical characters from art history,” evoking the spiritualist search for transcendence and the absolute. Bessède's pictorial practice becomes a “total plastic writing,” recalling the spiritualist idea of the mind as a living and active principle. Thus, Bessède's work embodies the principles of “realism or spiritualist positivism” predicted by Ravaisson, where the spirit becomes aware of its own existence as the source of all other existence. His art aims to extract a profound truth, reflecting the spiritualist quest for the spiritual advancement of humanity.

Excerpt from text by Anne Devailly
In Jean-Louis Bessède's painting, the figure is always at the center of the work. Characters and creatures with often frail and distorted bodies, but who have things to say... and the discourse has changed completely in the last two years. The story of a painting that marks a rebirth.

Even before 2020, Jean-Louis Bessède's paintings brought together living beings, more or less fantastical. Even then, they occupied the canvas without any background elements providing context.
The themes remain unchanged: humanity, the animal part of man, the links between all living beings. But on closer inspection, subtle differences change the meaning of the artist's current work.
“Before,” the canvases started with black and white confronting each other on either side of the work, and in the middle, shades found their way as best they could between the force of the black/white contrasts.
Today, faster drawing techniques, more peaceful constructions, and deliberately thin lines dominate, whereas in previous years the artist used crumpled, folded paper embedded in plaster to give a certain thickness to the canvas.
And then, tiny details show an evolution: today, there is usually a white figure, and simple, understandable words are scattered across the canvas and surround the figures. And these words are mostly bearers of hope.
Between a “before” and an “after,” the artist underwent psychotherapy, which he now sees as a complete rebirth. He, whose life had been marked by a terrible tragedy in his childhood (the murder of his father), finally found new momentum, and this way of seeing life is reflected in his painting. It was not painting itself that constituted the therapy, but rather painting that benefits from the resulting effects.
"Each individual defines themselves somewhat in relation to others, but one must be able to keep this aspect in perspective. We can all try to rediscover something more essential, untainted by society and the gaze of others.