Artist Statement by Jean-Paul Mansour:

If one asked for my way to me of working and to see art in fact painting I would say: 
I leave time to the matter. When I paint, I work my funds by superposition of layers and colours, which can take to me several days spaced by the rest of the matter. A blue sky is not a blue left the tube, but a whole of surfaces applied with values and colours which come to supplement the required goal. I do not touch necessarily the final subject which constitutes the centre of my fabric but modifies the funds in order to project a considered colour which will influence my principal subject. The superposition of the layers called in washing, allows the penetration of the light until touching the fabric, for then restoring us the colours with an effect of depth and vibration. All things considered, in my work, the local, tonal and considered colours determine the whole of the colour of a precise subject. I am not against what one calls, today, freedom of expression in any form of art whatever it is, but I will always defend the rules which enable us to express our compositions.

Indeed, I always regarded art as a science. - The science of arts. In what relates to me, art is not free as one tends to see it nowadays. Art is a science which is worked with much perseverance. An anecdote illustrates this matter well: One brought to Rubens a young man who wanted to make a painting. - It can paint well, it would help you to carry out the funds for your paintings. According to what is brought back to us, Rubens pretends the astonishment and admiration. - It can make the funds! Bring immediately it to me, because that made of the years that I try to make the funds and I still have much evil!

When one sees works of art - worthy of this name - one forgets all work, perseverance, efforts, even tears of the artist.

Art is a science which always existed in the concept of the universe. It is subject to rules coming from eternity. The artist does nothing but discovers these concepts. He does not create anything, but its genius lies in the composition, the assembly of what is placed at its disposal. In fact, nothing is free. Admittedly there are people who are born with a gift, but the gift is a heritage of the existence, not parents. As known as Gibran Khalil Gibran "the love is even satisfied with him and need for anybody does not have". I think that art is satisfied to be and nothing of anyone waits. What I try to say, it is that many people, boasting in their content, put art at their service. However, I think that the man is at the disposal of art. He is the servant of poetry, painting, the music, any science or artistic science, because any music exists in the universe, any form artistic, geometrical, any color, any song are only one assembly of the elements original of what and is placed at our disposal, and free to us to discover the language and the assembly of it. I insist on perseverance because to use siccative Flemish is not acquired in an evening. To make its own mixture of turpentine and Flemish, linseed oil siccative, is not only one receipt which one applies but a wild proportioning that one learns how to tame with time. Such was the work of the old. I believe in addition to any modern painting, nothing of all that, but in modern subjects, the evolution of the thought, consequently of art and sciences. Today, we better a quality to pictorial texture, but which modernism did one give bring? Freedom of the expression? but which freedom? Have freedom in mathematics to say that two parallels meet and you will see, in theory, all the trains running off the line. The same applies to all arts. Rules of construction and colour as of the forms are laid down before the existence of the man; me, I will discover them and not will invent them.