About

Jehan Legac is a French visual artist whose practice spans five decades of photography and painting.

Biography

Born in Paris, he received his first camera, a Yashica, at fourteen, and made his first paid photographs at fifteen, documenting cats on the rooftops of Paris for a photo agency. Photographing his sister, he gradually discovered the subject he would carry throughout his life, first to the lens, then to the brush: the female form.

In 1974 he was appointed personal photographer to Admiral Philippe de Gaulle within the French Navy, a mission that took him from the North Pole to tropical islands. In 1984 he moved to New York, where he expanded his practice into fashion photography and three-dimensional design; Miami and Los Angeles followed.

In the late 1990s he acquired La Falaise, a house in Ibiza that had once housed the studio of Elmyr de Hory. There, night after night, he found himself painting until dawn, and a pictorial practice gradually took precedence over everything else. Since the early 2000s, oil painting has been the culmination of his visual research.

In 2005 he discovered Asia through an art fair in Beijing, at the invitation of NY Art Magazine, then explored Shanghai, Manila and Bangkok. After years shared between Ibiza and Bangkok, he established his principal studio in Thailand. He is currently planning a presence in Hong Kong.

Six series trace a practice devoted to the female form: Nude Geometry (2002), Essence Unseen (2007–2010), Neo Horizon (2020–2021), Aqua Veil (2022–2023), Held Breath (2024) and Threads of Eternity (2025). Since 2024 he has used generative artificial intelligence as a laboratory for transforming his own photographic archive, with oil on canvas as the manual gesture of completion. His recent works, in large formats up to 150 × 150 cm, explore the feminine as a contemplative presence through a blue, gold and flesh palette, and veils. A monograph is scheduled for 2027.

Artist statement

“My practice unites two disciplines I have pursued in parallel for five decades: photography and painting. […] The image has remained my language.”

“A photograph rarely lives more than seventy years. […] Oil painting on canvas, by contrast, can cross the centuries. It is this desire for duration that led me to painting.”

“Today I paint the female form in oil on canvas, in large formats. […] AI is neither the author nor the work: it is a tool, as the analog camera was before it.”

“I seek to bring forth, in silence, a female figure that escapes narrative — a presence that speaks without words, half portrait, half icon, offered to whoever will discover it, today or three hundred years from now.”

Discover more

Portfolio: see the complete portfolio
Instagram: @jehanlegacart
Enquiries: contact@jehanlegac.com