WITH THE DEALAN: NUN SERIES, CONNOR TINGLEY AND JACQUES MARIE MAGE TRANSFORM ART AND EYEWEAR INTO A SINGULAR MEDITATION ON CRAFT AND PERCEPTION.
There are projects, and then there are returns. The most recent collaboration between artist Connor Tingley and Jacques Marie Mage feels like the latter—a loop closing, a moment long in the making that doesn’t announce itself with fanfare, but with an iconic silhouette seen anew. Not a launch, but a culmination. Not the unveiling of something new, but the revelation of something that has been quietly forming, years in the making.
he frame is the Dealan, originally released in Spring 2015, JMM’s first season. The inspiration is the NUN series, intricate and ingenious paintings that Tingley began conceptualizing in 2014. The connection is intimate, running deeper than acetate or oil paint.
“There’s a kinship between the impact of the NUN series on my life and the impact of the Dealan on Jérôme’s,” says Tingley, referring to his friendship with JMM’s founder. “That’s why we chose this frame. Both have served, in many ways, as our magnum opus.”
The Dealan has long served as a kind of ideological anchor for JMM—an eyewear archetype pulled from the golden age of counterculture and recast in limited runs of unapologetic modernity. For Tingley, the NUN series has carried an equally intimate weight: what began as a digital sketch evolved into drawings, then studies, then monumental paintings each rendered in negative color codes using over 22 layers of paint and a Renaissance-era technique called Sfumato. It’s a series about devotion, duality, and disruption. About what happens when memory paints itself in reverse.
A long and arduous process, the NUN paintings have been lived with, fought for. “What this series has taught me,” Tingley reflects, “is that I can believe in something so much and put my heart and soul into it. And the treasure is actually that I did it. Not that someone came along and validated it.”
The formal collaboration between the artist and JMM sees the Dealan reimagined in a color story directly inspired by the NUN paintings’ teal and white elements, the ’60s-inspired spectacle finding new expression in translucent Blue Steel acetate, accompanied by lenses in Orange, and featuring JMM’s signature polished metal arrowhead front-pins in White for the first time.
“It’s not really about reinventing the wheel,” Tingley says. “It’s about my life and Jérôme’s life meeting, materializing into something unique and authentic that resonates.”
This isn’t the first time Jérôme and Connor’s mutual respect has materialized into something more. When the first JMM Gallery opened in Venice in 2022, it did so with Tingley’s Reflection in Present Memory, an expansive work that depicts memories made while wearing JMM eyewear, fragments of time literally framed in lenses that resemble the shape of the Dealan.
It’s fitting then that the Dealan: NUN Series, produced in a very limited edition of 50, are available exclusively at the Venice gallery, a release accompanied by the unveiling of Tingley’s NUN paintings—the first time they have ever been shown publicly. Until now, these works have lived only in the artist’s studio, private companions in a long meditation on perception, judgement, and the tension between tradition and technology, the visible and the hidden.
But perhaps the real subject here isn’t opposition at all, but belief. In a world that seems determined to commodify everything, both the Dealan and the NUN series stand as an ode to the kind of work that insists on existing without permission. And that might be the most important kinship of all—the artist and the frame, both shaped by obsession, both demanding to be seen on their own terms.