Jacques Oulé was born in France in 1958, he grew up in Aix en Provence, lived in Paris before moving to Toronto in 1981.
He has pursued an interest in photography for many years, questioning its content and his position in it, and has immersed himself with its range of thecnique and possibilities. As a visual artist Jacques Oulé use the camera as a tool to look deeply and carefully at the world around him and bring images together in an attempt to amplify their presence through the questions and dialogues they creates.
Jacques Oulé as had Exhibitions in Canada and the US, his work as been featured in books and magazines and newspapers.
Jacques Oule’s work manages to mirror it’s power in theme, aesthetic, and material/media. In other words, the construction of his imagery has a way of importing the media he uses into the message, and of course, the inversion is also true. Time, memory, how we relate to or savor these, and how we deny them all manage to echo across his eras of work. One must investigate his work in it’s fullness to start to appreciate it’s breadth and unlock it’s depth.
Because Jacques’ works across and in mixed media and because he has decades of work to cull from, I’ve decided to focus on a segment of his traditional photography as intro. These black and white photographs, which find location and subject in varying, lovely, and unified ways, stood out to me as a perfect introduction.
I am planning a follow-up interview and a more in-depth probe into his work, which deserves much broader exposure.
These photographs have so many successful and inspired attributes that it is impressive to see them side by side. Poetry, which includes great pathos and love penetrates these, and the frame seems to tell us so much and ask even more.
Worlds apart and conjoined by sentiment and care, a sense of connection and a sense of the sensual in it’s full scope is apparent in this work to me.
Go to his site for much more work here: jacquesoule.com
Josh Reichmann
March 2020