extract from MEANING: An Anthology of Artist’s Writings, Theory, and Criticism, Duke University Press 2000

Edited by Susan Bee and Mira Schor

I was born with the condition of the wide-awake dreamer. I can still feel the wind blowing at the temples of my sixteenth year at a time when I was living on the back of a camel, crossing long stretches of bumpy desert road in search of a well that doesn’t go dry. Painting was my love, but one day I had reluctantly to dismount, as we were in Algeria where there was a war going on with the French army and I was a draft able young Frenchman.

Quietly unwinding in the back of my head during the long period of my reluctant military service was a subversive lasso of satire and derision that would later help me catch and drag through the dirt the crassness and stupidity of the French “petite-bourgeoisie.”

It was in Paris in May 1968, however, that the real change took place for me. I was feeling closer to the Situationists than to the art establishment. I remember this marvellous sentence on the walls of Paris at the time - “Sous les pavés - la page” (“Under the pavement - the beach”). There was a call for a new poetic energy - the Parisian art world was anaemic. The system of the Beaux Arts Academy was ossified and centred around the conservative Prix de Rome. Picasso, already in decline, was hard to shake. Bernard Buffet, catapulted to a Paris-Match - type fame, was the prototype of the 1980s New York art-star systems. Soulless was no Franz Kline and in his small formats, his black bars were shaking. Georges Mathieu was officially crowned by André Malraux as “at last, an occidental calligrapher” as though Bottlieb didn’t exist. Mannnessier could be dangerously decorative and Bazaine, as a postimpressionist, lacked the tension of his American colleagues. When the American Painting Show was on view in 1965 at the Musée d’Art Moderne, everything fell into perspective. It was in that artistic context in the years following May 1968 that I started to publish absurdist drawings-cum-cartoons in the new magazines of black humour like Hara-Kiri and Charlie. 

At the end of the 1960s, I began painting again. The human figure, which had troubled me for several years, found its way into my paintings disguised as semi-abstract signs and caricatural characters that popped from the painterly ground like knots of light or ghost-like figures concretizing space. The drawn line, clear on a colored ground, held the systems of shapes like a luminous net. The slapstick mood and lushness of color rendered less threatening my private bestiary of violent instincts, bawdy manners, diffuse fear, contagious glee, and even, sometimes, serenity. 

Jacques Roch