In 1971, Julie Bessard opened her eyes for the first time to the colours of the world. Born to a family of collectors, her early years were spent in Châtellerault in the Vienne region of France. Her mother had written a thesis on Aimé Césaire, and her maternal grandfather was a confirmed bibliophile. The future artist and her family moved to Martinique in 1976, in a return to her father’s homeland. J. Bessard had long been drawn towards the visual arts when she discovered the medium of pastel at eighteen, and from then on she experimented. A veritable ‘water woman’, she painted her first abstract works on Plexiglas during sea diving trips. She trained at the École régionale d’arts plastiques de Martinique in Fort-de-France, in one of the school’s first cohorts, and graduated in 1995, marking the beginning of her pictorial work.

Having obtained her agrégation (the competitive examination necessary to become a professor in France) in 2008, six years later J. Bessard became academic and pedagogical regional inspector for the visual arts in Martinique, Guadeloupe and French Guiana. During the same period, she developed a number of major installation projects, including Ombres portées, displayed at the Centre Martiniquais d’animation Culturelle – scène nationale in 2006 and at the Musée Dapper in Paris in 2008, and L’Envol (2007). The latter, deployed among the barrels of the Clément distillery, created plays of movement and deepened the symbolic density of the architectural heritage of the site. In parallel with this, the artist taught classes on colour and coordinated research in the visual arts department of the Campus caribéen des arts in Fort-de-France.

J. Bessard’s artistic career is woven throughout with encounters. Encounters with the Other, through her association, Sans Titre, active from 1995 to 2005, which brought together Martinican visual artists Jacqueline Fabien (born 1954) and Thierry Major (born 1965), alongside encounters with the Elsewhere. Travels in Tibet, India, Bhutan, Laos, a trek into the heart of the Himalayas: these are just some of the peregrinations that have served to reinforce the artist’s aesthetic vocabulary and her profound connection to spectacular natural landscapes. Her first wanderings in Pondicherry in 1997 crystallised her shock at being confronted by colour, from the dazzling tumble of saris to the magical violence of pigments. In her alchemical, symphonic compositions, brilliant colours in pastel pierce a profound black ground that was once red. Of course, we can read here the evident influence of the chromatic Martinican landscape, yet the artist lays claim to an intuitive process, arising from the tension of gesture and an infinity of possibilities. Her expression, imbued with a vital force, is deeply marked by poetry, cinema and the artist’s passion for surfing, which she has practised since the late 1980s.

In 2019, the Fondation Clément inaugurated a monographic exhibition of the artist’s work, La Peinture en éclats, unveiling a major series of recent pieces. She would exhibit there again in 2021 as part of the group exhibition De Feu et de Pluie, to which she contributed the monumental Sismographie Méga-poétique. In 2024, J. Bessard developed a mentoring programme for women artists, while continuing her prolific creative output, dividing her time between Italy, Corsica and her studio in the Martinican commune of Schoelcher.