John Lurie

The skeleton in my closet has moved out to the garden

John Lurie, known of the general public for his participations as an actor in the films Down by Law and Stranger than Paradise by Jim Jarmusch, is also successful as a musician, as a composer of original movie soundtracks and director of the television series Fishing with John. In parallel, John Lurie develops since the beginning of his career an activity as painter, draughtsman and illustrator. These works are characterised by the same singular aesthetics you can find in his music: sometimes chaotic, very spontaneous and with a certain taste for provocation. His drawings evoke the freedom of a child’s image. Their insolence, like their particular use of colour, often deliberately choosing the bad tone, create a visual cacophony which echoes the acoustic complexity of his music. Defining his art works as “widened Rorschach tests”, Lurie begins each one of those as intuitively as possible, and then imagines, only “when the work is the three quarters finished”, a title giving it an unexpected twist, like a caricature. Their caustic, absurd and Dadaist humour, as their laconic sexual allusions, often hide considerations on the human condition, granting his work a dramatic aspect.