Cerises

The subject may not be so essential after all, that is perhaps why I will be able to paint cherries all my life. Jacques Halbert

The Monochrome Put to the Test of Pornography
In 1975, at the age of twenty, Jacques Halbert wrote a foundational text for his artistic practice : How to Paint a Cherry. In it, he describes step by step the process of making a cherry painting, before mischievously concluding : “If you have followed these instructions to the letter, you now have before your eyes a magnificent cherry painted by yourself. Therefore, you are an artist.”
This text is foundational in two ways : first, because Jacques Halbert would indeed go on to paint this cherry tirelessly throughout his life; and second, because he conceived painting as a tool capable of fundamentally transforming the traditional relationship people maintain with the work of art.
The subject of the “cherry” is banal - even embarrassing when placed within the context of the 1970s art world, at a time when Minimal Art and Conceptual Art reigned supreme. Yet everyone loves cherries. They herald summer and childhood festivities; they are glossy, juicy, sweet, and red. “Cherry” is also a woman’s name; its forms are suggestive, and its color recalls patent leather. Confronting the cherry with the most sophisticated form of painting produced by modern art — namely the monochrome — would become, for Jacques Halbert, the missing link between art and life.
From that point onward, Jacques Halbert relentlessly subjected the monochrome to strain, destabilization, and fragility through this systematic procedure of surgical precision. He developed this figurative motif through regular rhythms and random compositions alike, pursuing for more than forty-five years a minimal body of work that invites viewers into a profound redefinition of painting.
At first glance innocent, the cherry carries a latent violence underscored by its crimson red color — the color of danger. Like an indelible drop of blood, or a lipstick stain on an immaculate surface, it is the forbidden gesture that unsettles the purity of the monochrome, strips it of its mystery, and desacralizes painting.
This duality of the cherry is expressed by Jacques Halbert himself: “The subject may not be so essential after all; that is perhaps why I will be able to paint cherries all my life.” Scattered across the monochrome like mines over a wasteland, the cherries become the prolegomena to a radical conception of contemporary painting.
Jacques Halbert’s work is marked by the ambivalence of language and of the world itself. His move to the United States only intensified this ambiguity. While in France the motif carries erotic connotations in addition to being a feminine first name, in the United States the word “cherry” refers not only to the fruit but also, very specifically, to female sexuality. The chaste monochrome becomes the victim of pornographic assaults consisting of “painting cherries everywhere, all the time, and thinking of nothing else.” The cherry stem, always associated with the fruit, further complicates and amplifies the pornographic dimension of the work, as in He Loves Cherries (1977), where the model’s gender — clearly stated in the title — is nonetheless called into question by its representation.