1970 - 1980s: Serie Noire

In  the 1970s and 80s, Jarvaise began a series of large-scale abstract monochrome oil paintings, titled Serie Noire. In these paintings, Jarvaise interrogates the pictorial plane, reducing his vocabulary of images to a series of simple shapes and patterns, always revealing the hand of the artist in his style of mark-making. These works continue the artist’s early fascination with compressed planes and color fields. In Jarvaise’s black paintings, each layer is composed of a range of browns, ochres, grays and blacks that commingle to achieve a rich texture.