Work
While it is difficult to ascribe influences to Tirilly's work, references to formative elements can be found. The macabre and lugubrious tone of his paintings is in part attributed to the artist's esteem for the work of fifteenth century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch. Tirilly's litany of contorted and tormented characters also calls to mind the late works of Francisco Goya, the figural works of Francis Bacon, the portraits of Lucian Freud, and the oneiric netherworlds of Odilon Redon, all the while maintaining characteristic differences between the influence and the influenced. His palette and swatch-like application of colour seem strongly influenced by the Pont-Aven School artists, notably French compatriots Paul Gauguin, Paul Sérusier, and Émile Bernard, and the Art Brut tradition out of which he painted had as much to do with Jean Dubuffet as with general countercultural trends in post-World War II French art. Ultimately however, Tirilly's work defies direct influence. The derivatives are so tangential, the oeuvre of such extreme individuality that most attempts at having the paintings accord with formally accepted critical notions and forebear influences are easily quashed.
Tirilly's paintings are largely autobiographical, each image capturing childhood memories, family relatives, personal hardships, or transient pleasures. Despite the apparent anguish in his work, humanizing elements such as family, friendship, and nostalgia temper bleakness with hope, suffering with redemption. Self-portraits are common but typically framed within the context of memory or dream. Tirilly's paintings are meticulously catalogued via a system modelled on the Aztec and Maya codices; a codex number is assigned to each completed work and subsequent paintings follow in numerical succession. He favoured board and paper over canvas and acrylic paints over oils claiming the media were better suited to his work.
Tirilly's body of work is unique among the output of autodidact artists working consciously within the rough-hewn parameters of Outsider Art. While the label is no doubt limiting, the artist's atypical ability to combine the fantastic with the banal, personal distortion with autobiography, and joy with torment is a strong example of the tripartite tension between academism, realism, and neophytism central to the traditions of Naïve, Raw, and Outsider art.
Jean Tirilly died in 2009 leaving behind one of the finest, most idiosyncratic bodies of work in French outsider art history.
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