Archives

Alain Josseau

09.28.12 - 10.21.12
Exhibition — les Abattoirs, Musée – Frac Occitanie Toulouse

Alain Josseau

Galerie des Peintures d’Histoire, installation (2012)

Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Sollertis

Photo : Nicolas Brasseur, Le Printemps de Septembre 2012

Alain Josseau

Time surface 4 : collateral murder, aquarelle (2011)

Courtesyof the artist and Gallery Sollertis, Toulouse
Photo : Nicolas Brasseur, Le Printemps de Septembre 2012

Alain Josseau

Guerre version 3, multimedia installation (2002-2012)

Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Sollertis, Toulouse

Photo : Nicolas Brasseur, Le Printemps de Septembre 2012

Alain Josseau

Peinture d'histoire n°1, oil on canvas (2012)

Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Sollertis, Toulouse

Photo : Nicolas Brasseur, Le Printemps de Septembre 2012

Alain Josseau

Peinture d'histoire n°2, oil on canvas (2012)

Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Sollertis, Toulouse

Photo : Nicolas Brasseur, Le Printemps de Septembre 2012

Alain Josseau
INV. AJ.001/100, installation of 100 paintings (2008)
Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Sollertis, Toulouse
Photo: Nicolas Brasseur, Le Printemps de Septembre 2012

Alain Josseau concurrently has an exhibition at his regular gallery, Sollertis

Born in 1968 in Nantes (France), he lives and works in Toulouse. 

 

Alain Josseau graduated from the Ecole des Beaux-arts in Nantes in 1992 and then went on to do a postgraduate course in New Creative Technologies in Toulouse. Passionate about new technologies, Alain Josseau very early on directed his work towards a reflection on media images and, more broadly, on the status of the image. He uses painting, drawing, video and installation to evoke major historical events: the World Trade Center attack, the Kennedy assassination, the Iraq war, etc. The source images he uses come from the media, cinema, video games, the web, or even art history.
His work shows a particular interest in the subject through the prism of the media, as well as in the confused relationship between reality and fiction that the latter maintain. In a series of paintings produced in 2002, Alain Josseau chose to show us familiar scenes from the life of President Kennedy and his wife that had previously been seen in photographs: Arrival in Dallas and Funeral. Still in 2002, another series of large format paintings was dedicated to the attack on the Twin Towers in New York (WTC 11/09/01-11/09/02): "Suddenly these images are frozen, switching from one medium to another. This forced slowing down, this fixity is like a nose-thumbing at the ambient acceleration. Painting large formats is of the same order, accustomed as we are to the proliferating and endemic mass of small format photographic images. Most of the time, we access reality through the small window of the Internet and not through large panoramic images," says Alain Josseau.

 

In Toulouse, the artist has designed an exhibition of existing works or those produced for the occasion, brought together under the title "Galerie des Peintures d'Histoire", echoing the Galerie des Batailles in Versailles. Among his works, he revisits for the third time his War installation: here it takes the form of a huge Sand Table, a tactical table used by officers to prepare their military operations. 15,000 figurines, 500 tanks and other war vehicles, 100 aircraft and various equipment, all reproduced on a 1/72 scale, reconstitute a battlefield filmed by 32 cameras, the images of which are projected in an incessant, rapid and repetitive movement.