Alain Bublex

For over thirty years, Alain Bublex has been striving to make the ordinary more visible through ingenious processes that he offers to the public. Landscaping (in Korean) is one of thirteen exhibitions the artist has already presented with Galerie GP & N Vallois, a kind of interlocking assembly of his work that complements and partly feeds on itself.

In keeping with his practice as a photographer, Alain Bublex has produced a series entitled “105 x 135” consisting of accidental photographs - representations of a landscape with an uneven horizon or completely pink images, the only color that has survived the malfunction of his camera's shutter - images that are at once “funny and tragic” in the artist's own words. Around it, drawn frames anchor the work of art in an imaginary world of its own, accentuating its resemblance to a painting with which the viewer is familiar. For, as Alain Bublex points out, we appreciate a landscape in relation to a place we know and this comparison between the two is the primary condition of our gaze. His inspiration comes from anthropologist Philippe Descola, who explains that a landscape is only created through our experience of a represented landscape.

Questioning this gaze, Alain Bublex has drawn on the trompe-l'œil process, inviting us to leaf through magazines he has created from mock-ups of existing free magazines: the high-speed train magazine, M Le magazine du Monde and the Hermès magazine. The artist slipped his photographs into them, appropriating the magazine page numbers and replacing texts with blocks of colour to give a better idea of the structure of such an object.

For Alain Bublex, it is essential to reveal the production process, including that of his own work, to offer "possibilities for future gazes" as he himself puts it. Hence the incompleteness of certain forms in the paintings in his oeuvre. It is not about creating a misleading image, easily generated by artificial intelligence today. Instead it is about offering a vision to the viewer.

This vision also emanates from his video Paysage 20 minutes, a stroll along an American motorway not far from New York, where the view of a magnificent sunset gradually comes into focus, the sky blazing in shades of orange and pink, questioning the poetry of everyday life in a prosaic setting. What is more, the film was shot in the home of the American painter Frederic Edwin Church, famous for his glowing sunsets, in a nod to Alain Bublex's video.

The artist is also continuing his work on trompe-l'œil with reinvented pieces of furniture in which only the image of the object remains on a predefined form. From an old radio from the 1950s to an Eames-style chair, he questions the way we accept the image of a thing without it actually existing in front of us, provoking our reflex as viewers and prompting us to measure an object even in its functional emptiness. A trompe l'œil that gives us a better understanding of the conditions under which something is made and its presence in our lives.

—Jean-Baptiste Gauvin