Joël Brisse, born in Vichy and trained at the Fine Arts School in Clermont-Ferrand, has been painting and exhibiting for many years while also working as a filmmaker and screenwriter. Five of his films were shown in Clermont between 1998 and 2017, four of them in the national competition. Among these, Les Pinces à linge received the First Work Prize in 1998.
In 2009, Joël Brisse served on our national jury. That same year, the Roger-Quilliot Museum of Art in Clermont-Ferrand dedicated a major exhibition to him, L’Habit rouge. His work is now part of numerous public collections, including FRAC Auvergne, FNAC, MAC VAL, and the City of Paris.
Le Jardin des Oliviers (The Garden of Olives) brings together canvases in which Brisse’s dense, frontal material reveals a narrative without narration. The immobile figures seem to question their own presence, suspended in an interior space that also becomes a shared territory, shaped by memory, silence, and unease. The olive tree, a symbol of resistance and light, serves as a metaphor: a place where the image concentrates until it becomes an autonomous, fragile, and mysterious world, offering the viewer a depth that escapes all literal interpretation.
