Julien Jaca (b. 1985, Toulouse, France) is a French painter whose work bridges outsider art, pop culture, and post-tattoo visual language. Based in Hossegor on France’s Atlantic coast, Jaca’s creative journey began with four years at the Toulouse School of Fine Arts before he left formal education in 2012 to pursue tattooing full-time. Years spent traveling exposed him to traditional crafts and sacred visual languages, sparking an enduring fascination with their raw physicality and spiritual strength. A transformative event in 2018 marked a turning point in both his life and work, culminating in a deeply personal painting titled The Only Picture I Will Ever Have of You. Since then, Jaca has fully devoted himself to painting, producing an extensive and evolving body of work.

His style is intuitive, visceral, and unfiltered, colliding pop icons, spiritual archetypes, and naïve illustrations into myth-making tableaus that are at once ironic and reverent. Though he’s distanced himself from tattooing, its visual codes remain embedded in his process, from pigment play to symbolic layering. His canvases, often reclaimed objects like wood panels, door frames, or furniture, act as carriers of memory, erosion, and transformation. In his seminal series The Sun Never Sets on Me, recurring motifs like biker jackets, ancient vases, and tattoo flashes converge to evoke a surreal pantheon of contemporary folklore.

Influenced by post-slavery African American artists like Sam Doyle and William L. Hawkins, and European masters such as Matisse and Gauguin, Jaca paints not what he sees, but what he feels. His characters, Christ in boxer shorts, Mary as a tattooed mother, Mickey Mouse gone rogue, become electric symbols against luminous, almost digital backdrops. Text and image often collide as word-objects, graffiti-like cues that challenge the viewer to read beyond surface. Guided by imperfection and chance, Jaca embraces the visual echoes of pentimento, layers of erased and overwritten images that give rise to unexpected meaning. The unfinished, the overflow, and the obscured become essential components of his narrative. Through this raw, iconoclastic approach, Jaca constructs a bold visual language, playful yet profound, streetwise yet spiritual, inviting viewers into a world where chaos and myth find their own irreverent harmony.