Alain Séchas

Alain Séchas was a drawing teacher at the French National Education until 1996. Since 1981, his work as an artist has explored drawing as a projection from which the viewer cannot escape.

“In Alain Séchas’ latest paintings, we have fun, we party! Pussies and cats are immersed in an effervescent bath of urbanity, with a typically Parisian decor. […] Because, for Séchas, the world of painting and the painting of the world are inseparable. But in the current situation of a pandemic lack of social life, this elitist social fresco takes a strange, provocative and ironic turn.

[…] Opting frankly for a bad painting that contrasts with this mundane motif, Séchas smears a theater of figures. Sometimes, a chaos takes over the canvas, echoing the ambient heckling; a painting stained with pink and green transforms a garden party into a springtime explosion. The artist throws a can of paint at the head of his public, according to the formula of John Ruskin. These Cocktails offer the spectacle of a joust between the artist and his public. The expressive pictoriality, unusual, will surprise the Sechassians, but it simply affirms the painting, its necessity and its vitality. In this respect, the most decisive gesture is the appearance of the signature for the first time in the painted work: he affixes his AS monogram, which stands out from the colored agitation of the canvas, with jubilation and vigor. To the cruel deprivation of works and museums, Alain Séchas opposes the absolute necessity of art for its very viewers.

Text extract, Anne Bonnin, 2021