Vestiges et silence de l’envisagement dans l’œuvre de Jean Olivier Hucleux

Objectives

This article sets out to explore the psychic processes involved in the creative work of Jean Olivier Hucleux, an artist of the end of the 20th century, whose hyperrealistic pictorial reproductions have been able to generate experiences of the “uncanny valley” in his audience. This article also considers the psychic operators that participated in Hucleux's artistic shift in the early 1980s, in an attempt to understand its logic and functions in relation to the whole of his creative process.

Method

We makes use of Jean Olivier Hucleux's life story, and the careful study of his works, as well as the many interviews, documentaries, articles that relate to his output. The method is that of the clinical approach to creation, which does not reduce the analysis of the work to a simple application of metapsychology, but which is interested in the psychic processes involved in the multiple dimensions of the creative act (corporal, representational, fantasy, social, interrelational, emotional, transitional, auto-sensual…).

Results

This article highlights a creative process characterized by the repetition of a trying physical experience where the painter goes beyond his limits of tolerance in order to reach a space of exhaustion where “there would be no more language”. This creative practice, first marked by a ruthless constraint to create and leading us to identify primary forms of symbolization in his work, will take a more tranquil course within a transitional space where these enigmatic signifiers, these primitive affects, and these unremembered sensations will find the possibility of hiding/being found by and in the creative act. In the mid-1980s, a lawsuit for counterfeiting allowed Hucleux to take an important step in the reorganization of this constraint to symbolize, whereby “experiments of envisioning” could be updated in a playful and interactive way, in contrast to the mechanical and solipsistic nature of his first, hyperrealistic, period.

Discussion

Is the work of Hucleux a work of psychic survival, at the limits of the madness of self-control, or can it be understood as a borderline experience of exploration of archaic processes? Listening to the work and its author, it is possible to hear the way in which his artistic quest is only interested in forms and impressions linked to experiences of attunement with the environment; His faces translate, by means of the re-staging of the meeting of a frozen, mortified double, the silences and uneasiness waiting to be symbolized.

Conclusion

The study of Hucleux's creative work constitutes a unique window through which we can explore psychic life on this side of secondary symbolization: that is, this weft of experience where the senses and the affects irrigate the mental functioning in the form of formal associative chains, at the risk of intersubjective deviation.