Alain Bublex — À propos — Slash Paris

Giving life to a project through the creation of new formats, that not only prevent the project from being imprisoned in just one instant (by merging conception, production and exhibition), but also allow heterogeneous practices to communicate for as long as possible: from design to photography, and from mechanics to tourism. This is what is most characteristics of Alain Bublex’s work.

Examples of formats or platforms for these operations are: a car, travels, an Algeco construction site unit, a city, and interior architecture. Around these structures, a multitude of instruments of representation are organised, often functioning as tools for transposition, transfer or translation: sketches, drawings, photographs, blueprints, maps, models… It is not so much about presenting an idea mobilised through these different communication and exhibition media, but more about confirming an intuition with a series of consolidations. Each piece included in the project is therefore a trial, a moment when the project faces its own conditions of existence.

Alain Bublex’s work is organised along a perpetual availability principle that allows for old, abandoned or only dreamed about projects to be resumed and continually extended. The open potentialities of a project can always be reactivated. This “work-in-progress” format is thus a paradigm. Through it transpires the need to settle in the temporality of a continuous production, both hyperactive and free from the imperative of a final creation. The length of the project extends from conception (the idea) to realisation (the object): it dilates to the point when it seems only to be hanging in the air.

Only with this in mind can we comprehend Alain Bublex’s taste for exposing construction modalities, through the display of inventories, manuals for installation and use, indications for fabrication or exhibition, and the production of some pieces during the real time of the setting up of the exhibition, and so on.

Among the artist’s projects, we should mention Glooscap, a fictional city in Canada which only exists through its archives; Aérofiat, the missing link of automobile design; Tentatives, 16 exhibitions that we only know through photographs; and finally Projets en chantier, which show Bublex’s interest for architecture and landscape. Within this last project, two ensembles in particular: Plug-in City (2000), an interpretation of Peter Cook’s very serious proposition from 1964, and Plan Voisin de Paris where the artist re-thinks the contemporary city with the help of Le Corbusier’s blueprints.

If some of Alain Bublex’s projects are inscribed in his continuing interest towards the industrial world (Fournitures, a Darwinian production of furniture prototypes), his last works, on the other hand, confirm the importance of landscape in Bublex’s reflection: Arrêts Soudains for instance combines photographs organised in complete sequences of shots, or Ryder Project, an intervention in the North American landscape in which three moving trucks drive across the continent, or even Paysages, which recompose elements from heterogeneous landscapes into one image.

Elie During, The Future does not exist: Retrotypes, Editions B42, 2014