Jorj MORIN

The secret

Tapestry woven by the Saint-Cyr workshop.
With its bolduc Signed by the artist, No. I/VI.
1971.

Practising advertising drawing after his establishment in Nantes in the early 1930s, Morin practised, concurrently, painting and engraving—figurative first, then in an abstract style from 1954. His interest in monumental decoration expressed itself in mosaic (notably within the framework of the 1% artistic law, for educational establishments in the Nantes region in particular), but also in tapestry. Indeed, as early as 1952, he was commissioned to produce tapestry with religious subjects, which were woven by the Plasse le Caisne workshop (also working for Manessier, Le Moal…), before working, from 1969, with the Saint-Cyr workshop of Pierre Daquin—one of the major protagonists in France of the Nouvelle Tapisserie—and being exhibited at the galerie la Demeure. Subsequently, and up to 1982, other Cartoons were woven by the workshops of the École Régionale des Beaux-Arts in Angers, and then by the artist’s own daughter, herself a weaver.

With Daquin as a weaver (and as such in his own works), the material became a mode of expression, technical mastery an absolute mastered: the surfaces are animated, vibrant with differences in textures, dots… and Morin’s poetic Cartoons, with signs delicately symmetrised, ideally interpreted.