CHARLEROI.- BPS22 is hosting Belgium’s first ever major museum exhibition of the French artist Alain Séchas (Colombes, 1955). Although not a retrospective in the strictest sense, Je ne m’ennuie jamais… [I never get bored…] brings together over 200 emblematic works from different periods of the artist’s career, ranging from the early cats sculptures that made him famous to his most recent paintings, including animated installations, videos, and posters, all linked by one common thread: the act of drawing.
Alain Séchas first gained wide recognition in the late 1990s with his elongated cats- figures, whose minimally-sketched expressions engage viewers with their large, bulging eyes. Placed in absurd or comical situations, these figures—initially cats, later Martians—address serious or trivial subjects with a sometimes humorous, sometimes disenchanted tone. In doing so, he places deep societal issues amidst the most trivial every day episodes. While his works are quite accessible at first glance, they require time to fully appreciate their conceptual and artistic depth. Behind a smokescreen of light humour, Séchas offers a sharp critique of our world, highlighting its flaws and absurdities.
Curator: Pierre-Olivier Rollin
In 1996, Séchas created Le Chat Écrivain, an installation consisting of a sculpture and a painting, which has become central to his career, depicting a young painter writing a pompous letter to his sister, expressing his pride in finally completing a convincing portrait of their father, which he believes will bring him fame. This work, belonging to the Musée d’art moderne de Paris—and featured in this exhibition—is retrospectively seen as a key milestone in the artist’s journey. It was not only his first cat sculpture, which would earn him his renown, but also marked the return of painting to Séchas’ work. Having previously taken pains to avoid the art form, he uses the painting here as “scenery” intended to contextualise the sculpture. It is this particular “journey” that the BPS22 exhibition takes us on, with painting initially serving as an accessory to the sculpture, in the form of murals or painted canvases, before gradually becoming the artist’s favoured medium.
While the exhibition is titled I never get bored…, reflecting the abundance of the artist’s output, it could also have been called Changes in method, given how much Séchas delights in exploring different technical registers. Each series of paintings, drawings, or sculptures provides a pretext for new technical experiments, allowing the artist to develop specific narratives. Recent, previously unseen series like Maryline or Monaco are punctuated by emblematic pieces from different periods, allowing these older works to be viewed from a new perspective and for admirers to grasp the underlying unity of a seemingly multifaceted practice, driven by drawing.
Indeed, Alain Séchas places drawing at the heart of his work. With a few sharp and precise lines, he builds his shapes and organises the space around them. While his work occasionally resembles press cartoons, caricature, or comics, from which he bor- rows some of their codes, he always strives to distinguish himself from these models, in order to build the unique artistic identity that characterises him. The speed of execution and fluidity of his gesture allow him to soften his shapes, which come to fruition through the work of numerous drawings, reproduced directly on walls, silkscreens or posters, all of which the exhibition offers pride of place. In this context, sculpture is then seen as a form of drawing, or what the artists calls a “drawing in volume.”
For this exhibition, the artist has chosen to vary the sizes of his sculptures to create different spatial relationships. While large sculptures or installations, such as Platée, La Grosse Tête, or Jurassic Pork, naturally fill the BPS22’s Grande Halle, smaller pieces like Mister Mazout, Petit Baldaquin, Le Monument pour Jacques Lacan, or Cycliste édition, operate on a different level: they are displayed on various types of pedestals within a classic scenographic arrangement, highlighting playful scale interactions with visitors and the different paintings on the walls. Rather than “competing” with the volumes of the Salle Pierre Dupont, these sculptures prioritise a 1:1 scale relationship with the viewer.
Je ne m'ennuie jamais… thus offers a new perspective on the artist’s work, through constant back-and-forth between drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, and even video.
Born in 1955 in Colombes, France, Alain Séchas came to prominence in the 1980s after finishing his studies at the École supérieure normale des arts appliqués in Paris, where he learned to draw. He was soon supported by the Chantal Crousal gallery in Paris, and by the Albert Baronian gallery in Brussels, and participated in important exhibitions in France and abroad. During this time, he was a secondary school art teacher, first in the Metz region and then in the French capital. He worked as a teacher until 1996 when he was invited to represent France at the São Paulo Biennial in Brazil. From his years in teaching the artist says he learned the need to reinvent his work so as to constantly engage his students, as well as the ability to move from one technique to another so that he could transmit whatever best responded to each student’s aspirations.
The 2000s saw several major solo exhibitions, notably at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Strasbourg and the Consortium in Dijon (2001), the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2005), Mamco in Geneva (2009) and the Musée d’art moderne in Paris (2016). Simultaneously, he created several monumental works for public spaces, such as Superchaton in Bezons, France, Les Grands Fumeurs in Vitry-sur-Seine, France and La Cycliste in Brussels, a miniature edition of which appears in this exhibition.
