Artists

Alain Bublex

Press release

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.