Marcel Alocco keeps the forms and removes the colors. This is the opposite approach to that of an artist recently presented at the Museum of Sports in Nice, Laurent Perbos, who removes the forms to retain only the colors. Marcel Alocco is a regular at the Depardieu Gallery.
This artist, who dabbles in everything, has a Fluxus spirit, being both a painter and a writer, and he will be one of the promoters of the School of Nice. A weaver, he will, starting with women’s hair, pose another question about painting and color by weaving miniatures. Marcel Alocco keeps the forms and removes the colors? Yes, starting with white fabrics that he unweaves, unravels, or cuts into pieces, he presents us with paintings.
The visitor discovers on the gallery walls famous canvases like Les Demoiselles d’Avignon where he has added Adam and Eve, and then in a second version, only Eve. His paintings have a spiritual dimension, with the Bible and Genesis never far away. The colors emerge in a magnificent ethereal and spring-like dress, which could become a fashion where the spring goddess mannequin highlights the fabric, the colors, and feminine beauty. Is white a color?
We dissect this word ‘white’ to its core, and Marcel Alocco has achieved his aim. He has not copied Les Demoiselles d’Avignon; he has interpreted them. The addition of the first couple of creation, and then only Eve, reverses the biblical message, with the woman becoming the origin of the world, and another representation of Courbet explains this to us.
The chair, the frame, the easel, and the ladder have a common point: they all keep something standing, upright, in a vertical position. This verticality is here the painter’s psychoanalytic couch: he can be seated or standing, but he is upright! The frame placed on the easel is upright! The ladder is used to climb, to lift, it is upright, and thus
Marcel Alocco invites us to decline this word: Upright. These five objects are blue, the color of the sky, and must be interpreted together. The public will discover that from a simple piece of fabric, one can compose and create endlessly. A rag thus becomes a work of art. Marcel Alocco and the Depardieu Gallery allow the public and art lovers to lift the corner of the veil, to enter into the intimacy of the artist, into his emotions and feelings.
No one quite knows who said: “the artist is an exhibitionist and the public a voyeur.” It’s somewhat true, and the work of the critic is not to give in to his voyeurism, to describe what he feels and not what he sees.
Marcel Alocco takes us on a journey into his universe, as white as snow, the blank page, the writer’s anxiety, and it’s up to everyone to darken this page by philosophizing on the genesis of life of which Eve, here, is indeed the origin. Jean Ferrat said, “The woman is the future of man.”
Thierry Jan
