Alain Bublex — An American Landscape — Galerie G-P & N Vallois — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: November 7 → December 15, 2018

Interview Alain Bublex — Galerie G.P. & N. Vallois En 1982 paraissait First Blood, en français Rambo, film d’action dont le célèbre personnage marqua l’imaginaire de plusieurs générations. En novembre 2018, l’artiste français Alain Bublex présente à la galerie G.P. & N. Vallois An American Landscape, sa propre réinterprétation du film, intégralement redessiné sans les personnages afin de faire triompher le paysage américain. Entre son amour pour la ville et le paradis perdu américain, l’artiste revient avec nous sur ce travail ambitieux.

Alain Bublex, An American Landscape

Since his first solo exhibition in 1992, Alain Bublex keeps constantly reinventing the idea of a journey, placing photography at the very heart of his practice while combining it with digital drawing. The landscape appears itself as the main topic in his work and mainly the American landscape. It has indeed always been at the core of his research.

Looking for the imaginary city Glooscap, he travelled around the country from North to South, from East to West. He came back convinced that landscapes played a key role in shaping such Nation.

An American Landscape is the very last project of the artist. Avid spectator of the famous movie First Blood — the first opus of the Rambo series — Alain Bublex sees in this movie the staging of two heroes who both symbolize America: Rambo himself and the landscape in the background.

In order to con rm his intuition, he decides to draw all the shots of this movie, removing the actions that takes place and keeping only the landscapes, the camera movements with the editing. The result is an animated movie made-up of long poetic and pictorial shots with a typical Bublexian aesthetic. It refers in a surprising way to the American painting’s story.

For his new exhibition at the gallery, Alain Bublex will present the first ten minutes of the movie he drew, as well as a series of new works from the project. A crossroad between History, Photography and Drawing.

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« I am currently working on a new project that is deeply linked to the American culture: it’s about the making of a cartoon based on the movie First Blood (with Stallone in the early 80’s!). After seeing this movie lots and lots of times throughout the years, I noticed that I was more attracted by the landscapes where the action takes place in theRocky Mountains at the end of winter. Then I realized that the landscape, was without a doubt, one of the main protagonist pf the movie. So, I thought about an animated movie to verify this feeling: I redesigned all the scenes and camera movements, but without the actors and the story: it is just about the backgrounds, the mountains, the forest and the village’s streets.

The result is «promising»: indeed, the drawn landscapes are close to the American landscape paintings genre (from the Hudson River School, the Hyperrealists to the American regionalists of the 30’s) which gives a slow, melancholic movie. It points out the importance — quite particular I think — of natural landscapes in the making of the American identity. »

Alain Bublex