Petite Olive

“The Extraordinary Garden” is the result of the meeting of two multi-medium artists, Jean-Claude Mazel and Yann Jalix.

Jean-Claude Mazel was born in Paris in 1950, and he attended the Beaux Arts and the Arts Décoratifs. Mazel explores different pictorial techniques, but his true passion lies in drawing. He began exhibiting his work in 1974 focusing on the lines and grace of his subjects. Very early, he became interested in sculpture, and through this medium, he explored the studied refinement that he discovered. Through this technique, he simplified his models to reveal a poetic exaggeration that lends itself to the full size of his work.

Yann Jalix, bronze sculptor and video artist, has been interested for many years by plant life, and in his installations, he blurs the boundaries of video, photography, and sculpture through a combination of the three mediums.

Jean-Claude Mazel and Yann Jalix met in the 1980s but did not begin to collaborate until 1989.
They have since developed their own foundry and cultivated a creative dialogue where their respective works, presented in different ways, reveal the same artistic discourse and the same aesthetic exploration. In 2000, they decided to collaborate and bring to life “The Extraordinary Garden.”
In this collaborative work, their artistic vision is so prolific that the two sign as one artist “Mazel & Jalix”.