"I am a romantic in a world without romanticism," was how Jacques Monory, one of the founders of Narrative Figuration, introduced himself. According to Alain Jouffroy, Jacques Monory, whom he describes as a "revolutionary individualist," is a "history painter who rejects History."
A painter above all, filmmaker, writer, photographer, he creates mental images that question the place of human beings in the contemporary landscape. Jacques Monory provokes visual shocks, "incurable images," as he defined them. Immediately identifiable, thanks to the use of a blue mixed with a small touch of gray (this blue became, for his color supplier, "Monory Blue"), his first works, saturated with images partially borrowed from cinema, crime novels, news items or disasters, diffuse an evil perversity, a troubling distancing. "An artist must live on the edge of catastrophe," he said.
These enigmatic works, between dream and nightmare, are part of a cold and sentimental meditation, certainly in resonance with the atmosphere of his childhood in Montmartre.
"It seems that I am a little fascinated by violence. If I shoot, in fact I shoot at myself, if not at myself, at my fear, I think. That's it, I'm afraid, so I shoot. I started to paint revolvers... And I came out of this period, which led me to too much solitude, by the violence expressed by the revolver. The first paintings, which took me out of this prehistoric state in which I was, are revolvers, I used the image of the revolver. We know everything that the revolver can symbolize. And in addition, there is something very magical in the revolver, it is to be able to hit a target at long distance, it is in precision shooting.

There is something very magical about being able to connect with something that is far away from you. And a power over this thing that is far away from you, there is something fascinating about it. The objects themselves are fascinating… We are violent when we have very simple ideas, I think. When we see the world in a fairly simple way. Then we can be quite violent. As soon as we perceive it as very complex and complicated, it is already more difficult to be violent. For example, I think I remember that when I was little, I had a real violence, because I had the feeling that everyone was made in a certain way, that I didn’t care myself, that I was there to use them, that I had to sort myself out. As I was in an environment that was not favorable in terms of intellectual possibilities, or material possibilities, I quickly felt that you really had to be very violent to survive. And that was very clear to me. I didn’t know I was going to paint, and it took away some of the violence, of course. But I knew in any case that I had a violent relationship with life, I knew that very strongly. And then, it faded a little because life is not of a piece, not everything is horrible. If everything was horrible, it would be very simple.” Archive Ina, France Culture, 1976
“You have to fight with life. If you don’t fight, it’s catastrophic,” Jacques Monory said in an interview.