Contemporary paintings, Alaux workshop
Jean-Pierre ALAUX's workshop
Immersing oneself in the work of Jean Pierre Alaux is both a surrealist journey and a metaphysical experience. His canvases convey his preoccupations and fantasies through characters, symbolic objects, architecture or landscapes, associations of ideas and forms. His painting has always run counter to fashion, and is difficult to classify.
His sculptural work remains an immense curiosity. Like an anthropologist, the artist isolates objects from their use to give them a new soul. A piece of driftwood comes to life with two stones as eyes. Alaux plays with representations, improbable associations and humorous detour. He develops a language of pictorial wordplay, offering us humorous and refined rebus. Alaux sculpts directly in wood, stone and bone. He models and assembles with a personal technique (sawdust and vinyl glue or resin), driftwood, branches, scrap metal and wire. Rare on the public sales market, these sculptures are presented for the first time at this auction.
Jean-Pierre Alaux's work could be described as symbolist, dreamlike, fantastic, realistic or even surrealist. Poetic, musical and literary allusions mingle with humor and fantasy, with portraits of La Fontaine, George Sand and others... An inventive mind, enamored of symbols, myths and metamorphoses, the artist expresses his taste for the marvelous, the luxuriantly baroque and the unusual. His philosophical and metaphysical obsessions come together in his canvases with poetry, mystery and humor. Like the Surrealists, Alaux is convinced that there is a higher reality in certain forms of association, such as the omnipotence of dreams or the disinterested play of thought. He delights in unexpected connections between seemingly irreconcilable terms. He brings out a new meaning or, as Breton puts it, "a particular light, the light of the image". Flirting with esotericism, portraying the passage of time as a human fatality and playing with religious postulates, Alaux questions the meaning of our existence. In his sculptures and canvases, the painter seems to compose an antidote to the fear of darkness and the anguish of time passing.
Like the alchemist-painters of the Middle Ages or the High Renaissance, Jean-Pierre Alaux tries with the same conviction as his peers, the symbolic transformation of metals into gold and the search for eternal life. He presents these intriguing and magical objects that man invented to measure time, space and life, giving him the illusion of controlling them. Globe, compass, armillary sphere and astrolabe, for the mastery of space and geography. Hourglass, judge of time, clocks and sundials, metaphor for the passing of time. The bilboquet, the ultimate symbol of man's battle with chance and the forces of weightlessness, and the mystery of the conjunction of the elements on the fate of the wooden ball. The scales, the mysterious polyhedron and the globe are further emblematic objects found in his studio and those of Brueghel the Elder and Durer. We could have included Jean-Pierre Alaux in the category of modern alchemist painters.
Jean-Pierre Alaux populates his universe with chimeras, unicorns, temptresses and abandoned women. The human being seems to be part of this world, where rationality is replaced by poetry, melancholy or tinged with irony about the fate of Man. Alaux uses allegories to depict his metaphysical questioning and his meandering attempts to find answers. Alaux questions darkness and death. The ever-present skull and crossbones remind the living world of the fleeting nature of its existence. Mirrors reflect human fragility. Masks symbolize the dual nature of personality. Finally, the staircase, so often represented, seems an urgent reminder that existence is like a staircase ascending towards an indefinite future, while the sea shores remind us of the infinite recommencement that presides over our existences.
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