Monory’s direct reference to contemporary popular culture in his painting has had some critics align his 1960s work with Pop art of the period. But Monory produces a more pensive and sombre portrait of the modern world than that of his American contemporaries. Juxtaposing images from advertisements, magazines and newspapers, Monory creates cinematic, dreamlike paintings. Each is bathed in his distinctive Monorychrome filter of yellow, magenta or his signature Monorian blue.

Monory’s unexplained and incomplete narratives suggest that the artist has no intention of uniting his viewers in a shared understanding of the paintings’ content. He creates a narrative climate, but then he stops, and it’s up to us to create our own reality from his ambiguous paintings. No singular truth or meaning to be found? Oh hey Lyotard, the postmodernist theorist who defined contemporary culture by ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’. Lyotard saw something in the paintings of Monory that chimed with his own thinking and sent a letter across the French capital to tell him so. The film’s production follows the exchange of a series of letters between the two.

 Lyotard may now have had to make new celebrity friends in Paris’s Père Lachaise cemetery but Monory is still practicing artist. Space will be showing some of his film work and photography alongside the filmed conversation. (Words: Florence Ritter) 

 On until June 2nd.  For more info, visit: http://www.spacestudios.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/jean-fran-ois-lyotard-and-jacques-monory-screens

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