The Cages

But it was in 1973 that he conquered his place on the Nice art scene with his Fly Cage, a reminiscence of his school days, when at break time schoolchildren used to make cages with corks and sewing pins in which to keep the flies they caught in the classroom. The Cage, always empty at first, became the main vehicle of Jean Mas’s expression – “an individual mythology within the framework of an attitude art”.  He also develops a passion for philosophy and psychoanalysis. “I needed to acquire some cultural knowledge to eliminate the insect and change its prison into a pretext for intervening”. And the cage has since been multiplied ad infinitum and staged in countless ways – there has even been a giant version. It gave rise to the creation of the Ordre de la Cage à Mouches (Order of the Fly Cage), a “derisory, futile and insignificant” distinction which was awarded for the first time in December 1980. The award-giving ceremony is an artistic performance accompanied by a speech demonstrating Jean Mas’s virtuosity at juggling with the French language. 

Just a little (peu)

Not surprisingly, in 1989, his taste for the derisory, for minimalism and for words led to the “Peu”, after a foray into “Bubbles” (bubbles of soap filled with paint), another childish activity if ever there was one. But the “Peu” is far more serious. It is the visual formalization of the letter P of our alphabet, pronounced ‘peu’ which means ‘a little’ in French. The sign ‘P’ becomes the object of an artistic interpretation. “Playing with the homophony, I turned the letter P into a proper noun... Thus, the Art of the ‘Peu’ inaugurates a new art… I create the Art of the PEU.” 
The letter P comes in all sizes, colours and materials, and in 2003, an entire village, Bonson, “set about making ‘peus’”.  The Festival du Peu was born. Every summer, each villager decorates a ‘peu’ cut out in wood. Artists are invited and a big exhibition of the ‘peus’ is held. Jean Mas adds: “This letter has also been used as a means of expression in two schools and two old people’s homes.”  And Nice’s Faculty of Medicine is familiar with these ‘Peus’ because every professor going into retirement gets a Peu in his image composed by the artist.

Words

Jean Mas, this juggler with words, doesn’t content himself with writing texts which will be declaimed at his PerforMas. He also writes books – detective novels (“Un peu de meurtre à l’Ecole de Nice” and more recently “La Rue des Poilus”), catalogues, collections of thoughts, art books... Of course, the way he handles the French language makes it difficult to “export” because translators have a lot of trouble with it. He met with the problem on a visit to the United Arab Emirates – the interpreter was completely lost!

Nowadays, Jean Mas’s works can be seen in a number of galleries in Nice and at the Windsor hotel. Like a vestal, he keeps the flame of the Ecole de Nice alive, and also the memory of his glorious predecessors. He is working on a new book, “Un peu de conversation, 40 ans de performances”, and views the evolution of artistic creation with a psychoanalytic eye: “Lots of young people take up art... I don’t know... We are living through a time when narcissism is overriding the oedipal superego… It is a need for recognition, the advent of the “me, I...”

Yet he stays on course – his own course, that of an attitude artist, more teasing than provocative – and at the end of the year, he will not fail to celebrate in his own way the Nouveaux Réalistes and César’s 90^th birthday with Frédéric Altmann at the Centre Culturel du Bon Accueil in Roquefort-les-Pins.

“I am for the ‘nothing than less’, that’s why I like minimalist art which can be reduced to the essential” 

*A character of the Provençal nativity scene

Nicole Benazeth