Born in 1946 in Nice, where he lives and works, Jean Mas became firmly established within the artistic movement of Nice from 1973 onward. He gained recognition through the creation of a distinctive object: the Fly Cage (Cage à Mouche).
Over the course of twenty years, Mas’s artistic production branched out and can be organized around three principal areas:
A visual artistic practice, including the Fly Cages, Soap Bubbles, The Few (Les Peu), and Shadows (Les Ombres), the latter being, together with the Fly Cages, the key works of his artistic approach.
A performative practice, consisting of performances (Parformas) and action-lectures that develop across artistic, scientific, and psychoanalytic fields.
A literary practice, encompassing a wide range of writings: novels, correspondence, exhibition catalogues and art books, as well as a television screenplay.
The seminal object, the Fly Cage, the central vehicle of Mas’s artistic expression, is perceived as an individual mythology within the framework of an Art of Attitude. Through the various facets of his work, the artist appears, in a certain way, to embody and synthesize the spirit of the École de Nice.
