There is no doubt that Jacques SELLE owes his rare ability to love beauty and transpose it into his painting in some measure to the fact that he was born in Fecamp. These paintings do not merely ask to be admired: they assert a vitality and quality rarely seen in an artist, even a talented one.

   His paintings range from the near-figurative to the near-abstract. They are both sumptuous and dynamic; the brilliant and the dramatic clash in ways that can be elegant, striking or tumultuous; yet all is contained within a highly controlled range of colours.

   On occasion one can be bowled over by a sense of the alternation of warm harmonies and glimpses almost of the inferno, yet all the while one is conscious of the extraordinary down-to-earth physicality of the paintings which have evoked these feelings.

   Thus Jacques SELLE deliberately gives us hints of spaces, or beings, or places, without ever losing his own rhythm, and to this he adds a disturbing sensuality which leaves one confounded.
The eye is compelled to accept the impossible: the result of his creative impulse demands that one's mind roams freely, and that one is wide open to harmony - this even when the artist has simply amused himself by creating a light-hearted collage.

André Ruellan
Art critic

Moving spaces

Between lyrical abstraction and free representation, the universe of Jacques Selle (…) explores space, man’s inner life, and alternates between vaporous abstraction and (…) singular portraits, oft-times caricature-like.(…)

Much travelled – the Andes Cordillera and the Tierra del Fuego - , (…) he has imbibed what he found, causing to be reborn on canvas or paper impressions gleaned between earth and water, air and fire, elements which one often finds intimately mixed in his work, and which enables one to identify with the only colour. (…).

Passing from glossy pastel to ink, from representation of movement, from the expression of pain to plunging sensually into the cosmos, J. Selle has a tendency to return to a certain “minimalism” (…). At times, he is carried away by the pleasure of the composition at the expense of the pleasure of the colour (…), but more serious tone occurs to denounce the anguish and questioning which embraces man. (…) A symbol of the ups and downs of human destiny, the figure of a bird returns from time to time to haunt the internal space of the painting. But nothing seems to surpass his (…) abstract compositions and his collages, where blue continually competes with gold. (…)

Luis PORQUET
Art critic