Alione: urban artist at the crossroads of graffiti and comics. ALIONE OU L’ART DE VOYAGER DE l’INTÉRIEUR (THE ART OF TRAVELLING FROM WITHIN) Just a stone’s throw from Paris, Alione’s workshop blazes with color like a Bengal fire!
In the tree-lined driveway, a majestic walnut tree watches over the workspaces, the most imposing of which is outdoors, where spray-painting is a must.
It’s a joy to rediscover the work of the man who plunged into this art form “with strength, rage and determination”.
Shaken for a time by the stimulating explosion of Basquiat, the artist soon became fascinated by the molten colors of Van Gogh and Gauguin.
Alione’s work, combining the impulse of art brut, the commitment of street art and the poetry of comics, was soon noticed at MacParis, the unmissable showcase for contemporary art.
Fred Alione, an urban painter with an international career Today, a demanding and passionate gallery owner is opening up a wider horizon for him: New York and London.
A fine challenge, a new impetus.
Alione loves beautiful spaces: vast lofts, old bistros, architecture with large bay windows.
The artist reinvents these large interiors – with panoramic views – in cleverly colored planes and refined lines.
Alione works on her own stencils, scotch tape and scalpel in hand, while aerosol will later deliver its alchemy on canvas.
His style is now unmistakable for its light and composition.
Fred Alione, a contemporary painter of the interior portrait As we all know, the interior portrait as a pictorial genre reached its apogee in the 19th century.
However, the long-dominant academic theatricality of the genre would eventually lead to its decline over the following centuries.
These representations were generally limited to documentary renderings or purely descriptive pictorial work, with a predilection for watercolor.
These paintings were usually commissioned to depict the sumptuous homes of the aristocratic classes of the day.
Not so with Alione, as you can imagine!
Even if, in her own way, the artist is reviving this major artistic movement, giving it a radically new lease of life.
Alione revitalizes the genre, renews the approach and creates a resolutely graphic project, with an urban intention, a sober pop-rock inspiration, that is, a sensibility more connected to our contemporary imaginations.
But it is above all through the skilful use of techniques that I would describe as aero-solar that the artist breaks new ground: an acute handling of the chromatic materials of the 21st century.
In this way, the painter deploys his original palette and unprecedented vision on canvas, as a worthy heir to graffiti artists such as Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, to name but a few.
As the history of art is always expanding and intimately echoing, Alione’s taste for black line architecture is reminiscent of a Combas or even a Buffet.
Color is fundamental to Fred Alione The supremacy of color initiated by “Fauvism” is ever-present for the artist who has long admired the quartet of Derain, Gauguin, Matisse and Van Gogh. Yet the polyphonic Alione pushes back the boundaries of classification, imbuing himself as much with the enigmatic imagination of a Magritte as with the radically purified forms found in the still lifes of a certain Picasso, the mastery of color harmonies remaining his constant preoccupation.
But Alione is very much of his time, as much in the cultural references as in the popular quotations that irradiate his compositions.
Fred Alione, a painting technique based on the use of aerosol cans and brushes.
While the muted imprint of a Roy Lichtenstein – and thus of the Pop Art movement – may be reminiscent here and there, Alione is above all a rare aerosol artist.
A creator with a unique touch, with that special light that belongs to him and always powerfully envelops this multiple, festive and infinite play of “interior scenarios”.
An inventor of form, Alione definitively appropriates these new spaces and makes them sacred with the generosity of images and symbols that burst onto the canvas like great flashes of joy and color.
Celebrating a new era, a new chapter in the native history of Pressure painting, this original movement that has so successfully found its singular path and distinct place by differentiating itself from Graffiti art.
Fred Alione’s Portraits d’intérieur replace characters with the traces of their passage.
Alione’s Portraits d’intérieurs never cease to seduce, astonish and intrigue.
Here’s why.
These works are simply and subtly saturated with polyphonic signs of Life!
It’s up to us to detect persistence and traces of life in the endearing geometries of design and vintage furniture, and to divine fragments of destiny in these spaces teeming with familiar clues, with an unobstructed view of Elsewhere.
Here, a glass of champagne sparkles, a book pauses, strangely exotic plants flourish, a guitar surrenders, a saxophone waits, a sofa offers its tender motifs.
Here, tubes of color and pots of paint set the tone.
There, a childhood toy or a map inviting us to a great journey flashes.
Alione’s world is a soothing tumult, a harmonic bazaar, a grandiose disorder that resembles Life: a delicious whirlwind!
Let’s get caught up in this fabulous whirlwind of pictorial quotations that make sense and give a beautiful line of flight to this work, framed as in cinema, yet out of frame by its singular force.
Alione painstakingly stages everyday scenarios – haunted – inhabited by art history, in a vertiginous mise en abyme!
Here, the eye stumbles over a Basquiat, focuses on a Monet, glimpses a Matisse, is astonished by a Van Gogh, delights in a Wahrol or is moved by a Klimt.
We are in the artist’s home, in the home of others, in our own home.
And we find ourselves dreaming away in front of these immense windows opening onto the city that dreams, the monument that watches or the cloud that dances.
A free electron and a recognized figure in the movement known as Pressionism – the code name for the art of graffiti – Alione masters the chromatic magic of aerosol as much as the intensity of framing or the shimmer of textures: an impressive art. Instinctively, he applies just the right amount of pressure to obtain this vibrant light, still urban but already internalized in view of the radiance specific to each painting.
Then the canvas comes to life, and we find ourselves astonished spectators of a theater deserted by its characters, in a hallucinatory setting opening onto the infinity of Time.
But make no mistake, Alione’s painting is not just decorative or narrative beauty, it is also a work of meditation: active contemplation.
Alione’s act of painting is nonetheless pure energy and a teeming novel.
For every interior made by Alione reveals a unique story, an original film: a presence.
An invitation to a great journey into the interior of “interiors”.
A mysterious, immediate and profound work.
Infinitely human.
Antoine Campo