13 march to 06 june 2010
The whole photographic work.

This first retrospective of Alain Bublex’s photographic work gives an opportunity to see (for the first time or again) his entire production and to better understand the particular relation he has with Photography. Alain Bublex is not a photographer. In his work – as diversified as multiform – all practices are possible and can be used on a single project: photography, drawing, installation, design, diagram drawing, video, lecture etc.

However, photography has always had a special place in his work. Omnipresent, it is the starting point, the tool, the skeleton of each project. According to the artist, these projects would constitute the perfect alibi allowing him to make pictures. Photographs themselves would be the result of a desire to travel, to go to the shot location to face the subject. Thus, Alain Bublex is both interested in the picture making or in photography as a practice and in the pictures themselves.

For him, the notion of photography has to transcend the photograph to include what has come before it and what has provoked it, such as the camera (“Awareness Box”, camera prototype which does not really store pictures) or the vehicle which drives the artist to the shot location (with his “Voiture de Service”, an unmarked car thanks to which the photographer and its activity become parts of the landscape).

Alain Bublex presents other projects based both on drawing and photography: “Plug-in City” revives the architectural utopias of the sixties with their mobile and modular homes. Another example, the series of “Plans Voisins” turns the city into a proliferating advertising medium.
About fifteen projects linked to photography are here gathered: from “Glooscap”, first creation initiated in 1985 until most recent pictures belonging to the series “Mont Fuji” where the artist “transports” the famous mountain (and its poetic aura) into different landscapes. The artist’s new work will also be exhibited among these projects: some “Fantômes”-drawings (“Ghosts”) will replace, like some memories, pictures that have not found their way to Tours.

Many thanks to the ‘Galerie Georges-Philippe et Nathalie Vallois‘, Paris, France.