THE WORK OF ALAIN MONVOISIN

Certainly, Alain Monvoisin does not have a big head. Yet the smallest of the heads (there are hundreds!) that he paints could declare, even exclaim: "It's about me, about which me!", and that would be justice. Because they are speakers of a life in "boiling", dare I say, thinking of the Latin bullire. They make bubbles that swarm on the Beckettian wasteland, refocusing the "I" on a heteronomous apperception. The enormous attraction that they exert on the spectator follows the fragmentation and the learned games on culture thanks to a total mastery of colors and their spells. Alain Monvoisin lists. Ironic and virtuoso, he loves the incongruities of existence, because the reality of an individual is incoherent, said Beckett. Marcel Aymé had written "The Heads of Others". Alain Monvoisin paints the heads of the other-self, seeming to consider the human psychology that man uses and abuses (pathos) as a decoy, in order not to suffer from the contradictions and traps of language; moreover, improbability is for him more important than a hypothetical truth of the psyche. His oils on paper dazzle, succeed in surprising with each new format - 50cm×65cm. And his pictorially literary and literarily pictorial postmodernism (metafiction, transfiction, parafiction, anti-realism, intertextuality, parodic repetitions, over-determination, re-presentation, diversion of references, mise en abyme, enunciative blurring, etc.) is a credo of a painter, writer, visual artist, gallery owner, art historian, because he has had as many lives as he has heads, letting each one be for itself, devoting himself to owing them nothing, except an aesthetic of nomadic maximization. As a bonus, he attacks the conventions of representation with a taste for drifting: games of rupture, unexpected associations, diversions which, constantly, thematize the number thanks to crowds of faces announcing the temporal condition of being as - no longer one - but multiple par icite. You understand: Alain Monvoisin will never give in to the illusion of the same.

Frank DEREX