Jean-Michel Alberola

‘JMA wishes to point out that the five paintings being shown here are unfinished.’ Jean-Michel Alberola once placed this introductory text at the entrance to a Parisian gallery that was exhibiting his work. This was remarkable, since there were only six paintings and a photo on display. Only one work had been given a signature and sales number. His ironic intervention undermined the commercial purpose of his own show, which was after all being hosted by a gallery hoping to reap financial benefit from his work.

Alberola made a habit of such Duchamp-like Spielereien (games): he added comments about his work or the context in which it was being presented; hung his paintings too high; and sold monochrome paintings as ‘recycled’ objects. As if such a colour field was merely a second-hand idea rather than an original work. 

Alberola’s oeuvre balances on the edge of figurative, abstract and conceptual art. While he is known primarily as a painter, he works in many disciplines, from gouaches (see La pensée de Leibniz), oil paintings (see Celui qui figure) and monumental murals (see Pierre-Joseph Proudhon) to drawings and watercolours (see Gauche Droite), artist’s books, neon light tubes, sculptures, photos, films and text-based works. In the early 1980s, he was frequently associated with Figuration Libre, the French movement that prioritised free creative expression and blurred the boundary between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. 

Alberola often emerges as a critical and humorous investigator of the artist’s role as creator. He signs many of his works as ‘Actéon’. In Greek mythology, Actaeon was a hunter who spied on the goddess Artemis as she bathed. As punishment, she turned him into a deer and he was torn apart by his own dogs. Actaeon violated the limits of what he was allowed to see – perhaps exactly what an artist should strive to do.