The Paris-based artist Jac-Zap appeared out of the blue with a stylish website in the summer of 2014, clearly very much at home with the technique and imagination required to create a startling series of cutting-edge photomontages, making thought-provoking connections between sex and religion, image and culture.

In the only explanation of the work, the artist explains the role and purpose of the work in these enigmatic sentences: ’After their exposure in the media, I collect images to autopsy them, thus bringing the unthinkable closer together. What I create as a result is a subversive attempt at representational content. I take the images, crop and arrange them, and thus bring another reality to look at in the mirror. Finding their place in the image, the elements become part of a drama being played out; the theatre of familiar elements being trained to obey their allotted places.’ In Jac-Zap’s brief online statement, the artist mentions dreams, nightmares and silence as inspirations, together with Les chants de Maldoror (The Songs of Maldoror) by the Comte de Lautréamont (nom de plume of the writer Isidore Lucien Ducasse), and Charles Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil). The connections are not hard to see.

Here is Jac-Zap’s own rationale of his work, in his original French and in English translation:

Mes images bousculent dans la réalité de l’Être – les catégories, les classements et hiérarchies imposées par la morale, la religion, et l’illusion de la rationalité. 
Mes images sont les vomissures de la censure qui découpe dans nos subjectivités les interdits et glorifie celles utiles aux idéologies mortifères.
Mes images parcourent les lignes rouges de l’indécence et affichent avec insolence leur résistance à l’extermination.
Mes images sont hystériques, elles courent de manière ordonnée dans la fenêtre d’Alberti et la géométrie rigoureuse de la représentation.
Leurs fonctions – égarer, enfiévrer, et embraser.

My images jostle in the reality of Being – the categories, classifications and hierarchies imposed by morality, religion, and the illusion of rationality.
My images are the vomit of censorship, which carves out prohibitions in our subjectivities and glorifies those useful to deadly ideologies.
My images traverse the red lines of indecency and boldly display their resistance to extermination.
My images are hysterical, they run in an orderly way through the window of Alberti and the rigorous geometry of representation.
Their functions – to bewilder, to induce fever, and to set ablaze.

We do not usually include elements of photography on our website, but Jac-Zap’s highly original work is so obviously as close to art as it is to photography we have no hesitation in including it.

Jac-Zap’s website can be found here, and there is also a selection of work on the Artmajeur website here, tellingly in a folder called ‘nepasdormir’ – do not fall asleep.

We are very grateful to our Russian friend Yuri for introducing us to the work of this artist.