Jordan Roger barré
Born in 1996 in Romorantin-Lanthenay, France. Lives and works in Villejuif, France. Jordan Roger is a contemporary French artist who graduated from the École nationale supérieure d'art de Bourges, whose practice combines sculpture,embroidery, ceramics, and video. His work tends to develop a new queer mythology based on religious iconography,responding to discrimination related to queer identity. Through works with acidulous colors and sometimes playful forms,he develops an aesthetic traversed by social and intimate anger, where falsely tender humor becomes a critical tool. His hybrid pieces combine artisanal know-how, popular culture, and contemporary references to question gender norms and body representations.
In 2021, Jordan published his research thesis, Les Aliens sont des travelos. Among the characteristic works of his practice are Hell Soon (2023), presented at the Monnaie de Paris, and Burn Them All (2022), exhibited at the EDF Foundation and acquired by MAC VAL. In 2024, he received the Georges Coulon Prize from the Académie des Beaux-Arts.
His aesthetic is baroque: exaggerated movements, omnipresent decoration, overloaded compositions, dramatic effects,warm colors, and diagonal lines of force. He subverts the codes of glamour and camp to question gender stereotypes,social norms, and identity. He revisits queer and homosexual clichés, placing cross-dressing and kitsch at the heart of his practice. He thus celebrates gay culture and its flamboyant figures ("les folles"), going against the grain of a return to hyper-masculinity, and questions effeminophobia-driven representations, particularly in cartoons where aliens and monsters cross-dress. His creations blend imagination, exaggeration, and social critique, while affirming his commitment to queer and LGBTQIA+ cultures. His approach is deeply autobiographical. He alternately profanes the patriarchy—with Papa voulait que je sois bricoleur ("Dad wanted me to be handy"), a workshop and its tools covered in glitter and feathers—and the Jehovah's Witness community from which he comes and which rejected him, in a self-portrait wearing his mother's wedding dress in front of the Kingdom Hall. In the Thank U God series, he pays tribute to John Giorno by reinterpreting his graphic poems with humor, childish mischief, and a spirit of revenge.
His work has notably been presented at the Biennale de la jeune création at La Graineterie in 2022, with Le château de Disney ("Disney's Castle"), a sculpture resembling a fairy-tale castle, as well as within the framework of Cabaret Extra!,in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou. By shedding the "paternal mold" of Roger, he reverses Giorno's formula "You have to burn to shine": Jordan wants to shine in hell.
Éric Foucault
