No Man's Land (2010) Painting by Patrick Jannin

No Man's Land, canvas painted during a residency I did in Paris in May 2010 is intended to be a response to As Long As There Will Be Men, of which I admit to having only a vague memory. Be that as it may, as long as there are men, there will be life, there will be hope. I had been invited to do this residency in order to prepare an exhibition on the theme (N) Have (Not) Fear. It only remained for me to find what frightened me the most. Immediate response: war. My parents knew her, my father even participated after 45 in other conflicts around the world. As for me, I have only experienced inner struggles, anxieties that I have been able to generate throughout my life, without making too much effort, I must admit, spiced up here and there with a few traumas inherited from my ancestors. . In short, everything is normal. And helping age – helping art? – I manage better and better to manage these struggles. Finally, for information and as an anecdote, I completed the canvas on May 8th. There's no coincidence as the other would say. It doesn't stop there though. Because this painting generated in its very realization other wars, other destructions. When I made the first sketches, when I "laid" this project, I had chosen Alice in No Man's Land as the title. Having had a certain fascination for Lewis Caroll's work for some time now – I had been working on the White Rabbit for two years – I had finally started reading the famous book of which only a few childhood memories remained. And then also Alice I knew her. She lived in a distant Wonderland, a land of questions from which I was both present and absent and at the threshold of which I dreamed. And in this project the young girl who had as much Alice as Lolita – because she wasn't really ingenuous – found herself miraculously unscathed in the middle of a mass grave under a sky of fire and ashes. The whore-virgin had remained alive and pure. Nothing was then entirely lost. Are there no more men? It doesn't matter since it is a dream, a Wonderland. Hope remains. Yes, but. What if it wasn't a dream? Do we emerge unscathed from our own nightmares? If this Alice there has remained desirable down to the waist, down to the level of the reproductive organs, she nevertheless remains surrounded by corpses at more or less advanced stages of decomposition. So if there is still any hope of reproduction, of life, it will only come from the spectator alone, and on condition that he can, and wants to, "penetrate" into this canvas. But who would? Take a good look at that old kid. Even her doll has a gangrenous mouth. The blond toy, rotten angel, raises his hand in a gesture of supplication that the fire of war seems to have frozen for a long time already. And her plastic gaze does not fix the nourishing breast of the young girl playing with dolls, but the sky, this multicolored sky which evokes more the palette of the painter-demiurge than anything else. And then even if the hips of the woman-child are still an illusion under the off-white dress (remembrance of something virginal), the hollowed-out belly can certainly no longer receive anything. So give nothing more. Evil is everywhere, even though the male, who is said to be a troublemaker, is no more. So that's it, is it over? Is it the Apocalypse, finally? Already ? Maybe not, because we see behind Alice who far-sightedly has put on her death mask two ectoplasms, of opposite sexes one could say. Anyway I say it. Who are they ? Where do they come from ? That no one knows. In any case, they are there, not at all threatening since the colder of the two envelops the woman in a gangue of murky mud. And then if you look closely, there remains in the absence of barbed wire in the background an exit, a door. Maybe we can still dream after all. But that's not a reason not to be afraid anymore. In Paris, May 10, 2010 Patrick Jann!n