PARIS.- Jean-Michel Alberola (born in 1953 in Algeria, lives in Paris) is at once one of the best-known and most mysterious French artists of his generation. Palais de Tokyo has invited him to put on a large-scale solo show, the first in Paris since his retrospective at the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, almost 20 years ago.

Political, poetic, committed and profound, Jean-Michel Alberola’s oeuvre is a geography rather than a history, a panorama that allows him to act artistically on reality, feelings and the state of the world – such as the migratory questions which have been present in his work for over 10 years, the consumer society, or capitalism –, through paintings, neon lights, films, texts, objects, installations, sculptures, murals, publications and tracts.

By presenting a large number of original pieces, including a film about Saint Francis of Assisi, alluding to his thoughts about poverty, a lithograph depicting Queen Zenobia of Palmyra, and Passing the Frontier , a monumental drawing on cloth concerning displacement, in a dialogue with his previous creations, including his complete Neons, as well as several large murals, the exhibition will initiate a journey to stimulate both the eyes and the mind.

Drawing into its pathway major thinkers, from Robert Louis Stevenson to Guy Debord, or from Franz Kafka to Karl Marx, the exhibition stands as the departure point for a broader reflection about history and the state of world, in time or in motion, from its smallest to most cutting-edge aspects.

Shifting between artistic reflections and political analyses, between conceptualism, abstraction and figuration, Jean-Michel Alberola’s uniquely striking body of work is never devoid of humour. The artist pieces employ both fragmentation and superimposition, marrying plastically the word to the language of forms. By associating fragments of bodies or geographies to ambiguous statements or injunctions (such as Is the exit inside? or Neither law nor grace), he composes series of philosophical rebuses which question how we see art’s role in society.

Jean-Michel Alberola’s solo show at Palais de Tokyo sets out to map the little-known diversity of his work, by strolling in his company along the interstices separating aesthetics, politics, and feelings. "And so an attempt will be made, here, to show that unity lurks amid this disorder. Like an ant carrying more than its own bodyweight to the entrance of the nest."

"Conceived as an object of reflection, L’aventure des détails invites spectators to shift about and shift their perspectives. Each piece can be read as one detail in a rebus. Intrinsically autonomous, their presence together nonetheless creates the meaning of a large assembly. It is up to each of us to enter into this poetic, literary and historical game. In this way, Jean-Michel Alberola’s work invites us to experience a huge, borderless geographical territory. Its topography’s characteristics point in one direction or another, in a straight line, or via a detour, an ascension or a descent." 4

"Alberola is capable of revealing the most effective visual paradigms with just a few text/image inventions, which are chosen with care, astonishingly touching, enigmatic and suggestive. Like the fresco cycles of the late Middle Ages, (…) by focusing on the essential elements of an aesthetic message, these text/images provide an extraordinarily powerful pictorial works of an unforgettable depth, which is extremely coherent and yet intellectually complex." 5

L’aventure des détails is part of a journey, begun several years ago between the artist and Palais de Tokyo. In 2012, Jean-Michel Alberola conceived La Salle des instructions, a conversation room, in which the murals are witnesses, reporting on political urgencies. The various phrases that appear on them, such as “The question of power is the only answer”, “Air the golden age” or “Measure the gap”, become decipherable injunctions of a personal, philosophical or political viewpoint, prefiguring the major themes of the exhibition.

A major, unclassifiable artist on the French scene, Jean-Michel Alberola became known in the early 1980s, during the return to figuration and “cultivated painting”. His pieces can be seen in many major museum collections, in France and abroad. Solo shows of his work have recently been organised by the Musée d’Art Moderne de Saint-Etienne and the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nancy (2008), the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (2009), and the Forum de la Fondation d’Entreprise Hermès, in Tokyo (2009).

His work has also been on show in numerous collective exhibitions, such as "Inside" at Palais de Tokyo, "De Giacometti à Tapiès, 50 ans de collection" at the Fondation Maeght (2014), "Mathématiques, un dépaysement soudain" at the Fondation Cartier, "Néons" at La maison rouge and "Les Maîtres du désordre" at the Musée du Quai Branly (2012) as well as "éclairage en groupe", coproduced by the Frac Picardie and the Maison de la Culture d’Amiens in 2012.

3 Artist’s statement, quoted in “L’addition des détails. Chapitre Premier”, in K.O.S.H.K.O.N.O.N.G, Spring 2014, n°4, p. 18.

4 Katell Jaffrès’s statement, curator of the exhibition.

5 Lóránd Hegyi in Jean-Michel Alberola, La précision des terrains vagues, Un, Deux... Quatre Editions, 2008, p. 3.