Cameron Jamie
Immaterial Figures and Forces
Sep 3 - Oct 10, 2026
Mennour, 6 Rue du Pont de Lodi
At first, Cameron Jamie's drawings seem to emerge from a space where conventional categories lose their relevance.
Human figures, animals, objects, masks, anatomical fragments, inscriptions, and vegetal forms coexist within the same continuum, without any apparent hierarchy—as though each sheet recorded, in no particular order, everything that has passed through the artist's hand. For this new exhibition at Mennour, Cameron Jamie has chosen to focus on the small format that has accompanied his practice for many years. It is within this condensed, almost intimate space that this body of work has taken shape: around thirty drawings made between 2024 and 2026 on Arches paper using ink, oil, and pigment. Together, they form less a series than a journal, kept day after day, sheet after sheet, without a predetermined agenda or declared method, yet with an almost ritual regularity.
Each drawing follows the same movement: to build, destroy, and rebuild until the gesture comes to rest and solidifies. Layers of ink, oil, and pigment accumulate without any preconceived plan, according to a purely reactive logic—the artist responds to what the paper gives back to him rather than to an image already formed in his mind. This method, inherited in part from his ceramic practice and recalling the Surrealists' automatic drawing, finds here a field where the paper itself becomes living matter. The thick, resilient cotton surface of Arches paper allows a treatment that no ordinary paper could withstand: Cameron Jamie washes it, rinses it with water, removes colour from certain areas, and lets the pressure of the pen engrave the grain until its very thickness is revealed. There is something approaching trance in this process: the artist describes a state in which the memory of the gesture gradually disappears as the drawing unfolds.
From this accumulation emerge figures—heads, faces, fragments of bodies, beaks, eyes—that illustrate nothing so much as they register the passage of an energy, revealing less the presence of recognizable forms than forces in action. For more than thirty years, Cameron Jamie has developed a body of work that moves freely between drawing, sculpture, film, performance, and installation. While each of these practices possesses its own autonomy, drawing undoubtedly remains their most enduring laboratory. It is the place where forms first appear and undergo transformation. This new series reveals this role of drawing with particular intensity. Each artwork records an encounter, a reading, a memory, a sensation, or a fleeting image. Accumulated over time, these fragments construct a mental cartography in which time follows no linear chronology. Motifs return according to a logic of repetition, displacement, and metamorphosis.
In Cameron Jamie's work, the eye remains the irreducible sign of a living being; a face or a bird, recurring presences for many years, appears alongside lines that trace abstract contours belonging as much to drawing as to handwriting. Yet this vocabulary, however constant, never hardens into a repetitive signature. The artist understands it instead as a language that continues to expand, like an ancient script whose forms and forces slowly drift from a sheet to the next.
What interests him is not the dream but the construction of another grounded reality, in which the artist's body—his hand, his fatigue, his impatience—leaves a trace as legible as the motif itself. Yet there is something in this approach—letting the figure emerge rather than planning it in advance—that recalls animist thought: the idea that a presence inhabits matter even before the hand has inscribed it there, and that the draftsman's gesture consists less in creating than in revealing what was already seeking to appear.
— Christian Alandete
Cameron Jamie
Lives and works in Paris, France