Julien Jaca

Julien Jaca Biography

B. 1985, Toulouse, France Lives and Works in France

Julien JACA is a painter who lives and works in Hossegor, on the Atlantic Coast in South-West France. From 2011 to 2018 he dedicated himself entirely to his career as an international tattoo artist. His many trips made him experience the physicality of traditional works of art and handicrafts—from which radiate a rare honesty, a pure spiritual and visual strength, he says. In 2018, a specific event leaves an indelible mark on his life, both as a human being and an artist, whose impact still lingers on his series of motorcycle clubs jackets paintings called “The sun never sets on me”. Since that moment Julien Jaca has been devoting himself fully to art and pictorial experimentation, embarking on the uninterrupted creative journey of a hundred or so paintings and drawings.

Raw, intuitive, and disruptive, Jaca’s hand has specific plans. In his very own cathartic urge, paying no heed to aesthetic perfection, Jaca revisits, hijacks, and mixes specific cultures of his own world like tattoo history, biker scene from the ’70s, with traditions like antique pots, cracked faience texture, and ancient typographies. The old adage “Ancient as time, modern as tomorrow” may illustrate his work well. By initiating this deliberately explosive visual rhetoric, both familiar and enigmatic, insolent and poetic, contemporary and ancestral, Julien Jaca offers the viewer the choice of reading as protean and freed as his work.”