Born in 1944 in Tunis, Tunisia.
Died July 26, 2022.

Jean-Luc Parant has always pursued a double work of artist and writer quite singular. He called himself "manufacturer of balls and texts on the eyes" from the beginning of the 1970s. In 1962/63, he produced his first wax paintings in relief, then in 1971 his first balls like so many projections of eyes devouring space and the world. This elementary repertoire that he chose for himself, balls and eyes, shaped his relentless artistic and literary work made of “obsessive obstinacy” (Alain Jouffroy).

“So there were paintings that were already wax paintings, on boards: they were wax bas-reliefs. […] In these bas-reliefs, the eyes already played a very big role. And then, little by little, the wax passed to the other side of the support board: it became double, two-sided bas-reliefs. It was from that moment that it evolved into the ball: there was a time when he made large planks with bellies, that is to say that the relief became more and more strong, so much so that there were half-spheres on the board. And the completely normal evolution was to move on to the sphere: there really, the wax completely devoured, covered and ate its support.

Michel Butor in a 1977 interview with Michel Sicard about Jean-Luc Parant in "Jean-Luc Parant, Printer of his own material and his own thought", collective, José Corti editions, 2004.

“The first ball was an oversized painting, where the eyes, which I was trying to portray as if they were real, were overly puffy and covered the face and back, the right side and the left side, the top edge and the bottom edge of the table. The first ball was a painting that no longer had an underside and an upper side, no side, no meaning. I then left the support of the painting, I separated myself from the flat surface on which I was working as if the earth had become round, I made balls. The first balls still had the drawing of men and then eyes, then they were self-sufficient, they simply became male and female. […] The ball is the board that has become touchable. The painting is the ball that has become untouchable. As if the sculpture were paint for the hands and the paint of the sculpture for the eyes. When a shape becomes invisible it rolls up into a ball, when it becomes visible it flattens out. Touchable, the earth in a ball becomes invisible under our feet; untouchable, the flat sun becomes visible before our eyes. We touch and everything is in a ball around us, as we see and everything is flat; or we can't touch and everything is flat, like we can't see and everything is in a ball. The painting without the ball is sight without touching it, it is light without darkness, and without darkness light illuminates nothing, it is only fire that burns everything. I make balls to make the night and I make paintings to make the day. With my balls and my paintings, I have both sides of the earth under my feet, I have both sides of my body under my hands and under my eyes. »

Jean-Luc Parant in a 1999 interview with Nadine Gomez-Passamar in "The eyes the balls, the balls the eyes", editions of the Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1999.