Alain Sechas

Nowadays works of visual arts seem to reiterate their appearance in the place of a subject or use their context as a pretext to exist. After attempting to dissolve in the utopian immaterialness of modernity they now venture to vanish in the repetition of their own substance, by interchanging and combining the signs that compose them, and assuming every possible form of tautology and metaphor.

The extravagances of Alain Sechas do not elude this air du temps however much they may claim to. Instead they use its constraints and make them more conspicious, to add or reduce the perceptible to the visual, packaged in a often literal and direct way which moves the spectator by its extreme immediacity.

These pieces bring their formal system to completion and whatever style they explicitly assume, it is pushed to the evidence of a sign, deliberately excessive and emphatic. Hence any possibility of reproduction or representation is excluded in favor of a vehement, one might say, shattering existence. The work of Alain sechas, designated by its sole aspect and consistency, is more inclined to emphasize the spectacular machine than to reverse the steam. Through its purified repetitions and declensions, it has largerly shifted the visible to what is a priori expressible in words, establishing as a prerequisite, an implicit intelligibility, coded and shared by all.

What Sechas aims is to disconnect the relation that we establish all too often with the eye, eluding the time spent for the preparatory process to priviledge the moment the eye actually meets the object. Here, the spectator is never warned even if he believes he is prepared. Sechas prevents and dismisses the delay that everybody nowadays is so keen on, and must fill in a unique way with speculative information containing an egotistic nomination or judgement, always subjective no matter what.

With this new use of the interactive space so prized by our elders, the Large Head, the Octopus or the Gunny sack race developed like a Persepolis frieze on the walls of the Hotel des Arts prove, to the contrary, an objective reality, a hard hitting presence that projects ontologically outside itself.

These objects condense in a global vision that encompasses the subject, motive and mechanism, and is summarized in a factual iconography. In that respect, the artist’s works are somewhat like advertisement photos, glimpsed at subliminally while browsing through a magazine in a dentist’s waiting room: their beauty and cruelty has a much stronger impact on us then than subsequently, as we see them framed, fixed, delayed on glossy paper.

For such an event to occur, Alain Sechas must choose – and make - images that produce an immediate shock. His imagery never fails to produce repulsion, disgust, embarassment or denial, and, more seldom, approval. All these feelings and their form of expression prove – though somewhat late - that these works have achieved their aim: as light is always faster than sound so is the perceptible faster than the describable.

Unlimited Contemporary Art

Ramon Tio Bellido, Return to sender (translation Joan Olivar) in catalogue of the exhibition Alain Sechas, Hotel des Arts, Paris, 1992 (p65).