Jean-Michel Alberola

Saïda Algerije 1953
lives and works in Paris, France

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‘Please note: jma wishes to make it clear that five paintings are not yet finished.’ Jean-Michel Alberola once placed this text at the entrance to a Paris gallery as an introduction to his exhibition. It was a remarkable statement, particularly because the exhibition consisted of only six paintings and a photograph. Only one painting was signed and given a sale number. By doing this Alberola was effectively undermining the gallery business, which after all regards art as a commercial product as well.

Such Duchamp-like ‘pranks’ are not uncommon for Alberola. These can include providing his work or its context with some sort of commentary, hanging paintings too high or selling small monochrome paintings as ‘recycled’ objects – and thus suggesting that such a small plane of color is sooner a reused idea than an original work.

During the early eighties, Alberola became particularly known as a painter. France was also undergoing a revival in painting, though the artists of the Nouvelle Génération made less of an international breakthrough than their German and Italian counterparts. Whether Alberola was part of this group, however, is uncertain. Still producing only about four paintings every year, he devotes much more time to drawing, making books, taking photographs and writing. It is therefore not surprising that he feels a greater affinity with socially and politically involved artists such as Beuys and Boltanski than with the younger painters of his own generation.

Alberola is a critical and humorous investigator of the artist’s role as ‘creator’. A large part of his work is signed by him with the name Actéon. Actaeon is the hunter from Greek mythology who sees the goddess Diana bathing. Diana tolerates no male advances, however, and responds ruthlessly. He is changed by her into a stag and torn to pieces by his own hounds. What Alberola finds fascinating about this story is that Actaeon transgresses the boundary of what may be seen. Through this theme he explores the limits of the forbidden and thereby those of the iconoclastic tradition. A painting such as Le Nom d’Actéon deals explicitly with this theme. It is an abstract work in which some (blood-)red lines can be seen on a dark surface. The image refers as much to the mysterious, to ‘that which may not be seen’, as to the tragic fate of those who penetrate this.

In one of the ‘wool-storage’ rooms at De Pont is a wall painting, a work in situ which can be carried out by others according to a model by Alberola. It is an imitation, in elegant and fluid lines, of the signature of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865), who is considered the father of anarchism. Just as with Actaeon, this French thinker can be seen as a source of inspiration for Alberola. And although Marx commended him for being the first to write a critical and scientific treatise on ownership, Proudhon was not a supporter of the communist theories of his day, which indeed preached equality but gave little consideration to the freedom of the individual.

The wall painting is not only a visual ode to this headstrong figure; Alberola seems to be saying something about art as well. Like Proudhon, Alberola maintains a critical, anarchistic stance with regard to any form of authority in the realm of the aesthetic; his works are artistic acts which resist prevailing norms and values. Hanging paintings too high is one of these.

In 1994 Alberola’s exhibition Met de rechter hand (With the right hand) was held at De Pont, having been organized earlier that year by the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Roughly one hundred drawings (to which ten paintings were added at De Pont) were linked by the theme of the crucifixion and suffering of Christ. Alberola regards the crucifixion as being not only a Christian, religious subject, but especially an archetype for the suffering of man. It is a universal metaphor, which the artist uses particularly as an image for the irreparable rupture, which was brought about by World War ii and which has caused modern art to lose its meaning and purpose: ‘For me, the crucifixion means to take away the cross and to keep the suffering body, the body of Western man.’ Mostly fragments of that body could be seen – hands and feet in partly abstract, partly figurative compositions. But there were also images of the entire body, such as a painting in yellowish green hues, where Christ seems to disappear slowly into the pigment.