artist/ Guichou
France
Born in Antibes in 1955, Jo Guichou is a multi-talented artist who is both a painter and a visual artist, and was even a specialist in chewing-gum art. Her many naive creations combine humour, delicacy and nostalgia, halfway between Figuration Narrative and Figuration Libre.
Attracted to art from an early age, and developing great powers of memory and observation, Jo Guichou studied at the Villa Thiole in Nice between 1981 and 1990, where she developed a particular passion for charcoal nude drawings on kraft paper. Alongside a busy family life with 5 boys, Jo Guichou finally decided to make her work known and took part in several solo exhibitions, her first at Madame Hélène Jourdan-Gassin, followed by group exhibitions at Galerie 7 in Nice.
Five years later, in 1998, Jo Guichou joined the gallery of the famous Jean Ferrero at the same time as Moya and under the protection of Ben, César, Arman, Gilli and Sosno among others. There she honed her technique and developed something more personal.
Jo Guichou revives scenes from her childhood and translates scenes of life onto large canvases before tackling more serious subjects that denounce the inequalities of our society.
Never one to tire of her imagination, Jo Guichou draws her inspiration from the stains she sees, first in wooden drawers and then in her coffee cup. “I saw faces that I started to fill in with drawings. I could hear them talking. I’d start with the task and draw the thread of a story”.
In 2005, Jo Guichou began working with chewing-gum art, a technique that was still relatively unknown at the time, with the artist sculpting miniature heads inside little matchboxes. “For a visual artist, all materials are noble, because it’s what you do with them that’s important. But no one before Guichou had ever thought of the nobility of chewing gum and used it in such a beautiful way. VB (Article published in “Artension” magazine No. 33, January/February 2007)
Slowed down by health problems in 2011, Jo Guichou nonetheless continued with some productions. It was at this point that she began producing her cartography-inspired drawings. Drawing parallel lines with a pen, she conjures up trees and more abstract shapes. Lines and circles like cells looped back on themselves by the hundreds that “put me in a trance! What struck me was that I was actually drawing my cancer”. An obsessive technique that has given rise to meaningful works measuring over 2m by 1.5m (a collection of faceless female warriors fighting against injustice).
