Jean-Paul Jérôme was one of the founding members, along with Rodolphe de Repentigny (alias Jauran), Louis Belzile and Fernand Toupin, of the first group of Plasticien artists, a linchpin of Canadian abstraction. However, we are only just beginning to fathom the soul and mind of this artist, who with his three friends co-signed the Manifeste des Plasticiens, written in 1955 by Jauran, the group’s theoretician. Following the death of the latter in 1959, Jean-Paul Jérôme kept a lower profile. Indeed, the painter passed on only brief theoretical insights into his work and granted only a few interviews shedding light on what motivated his artistic choices. A solitary individual, married just for a short time and childless, given to introspection and an indefatigable worker, Jérôme devoted his life to art, initially in parallel with teaching, notably at Montréal’s École des beaux-arts, from 1958 to 1973, and then exclusively until his death in 2004, after a 60-year-long career.
