Marcel Alocco. “The Painting in Fragments”

“The Painting in Fragments” proposes to explore, through the practice of a visual artist and writer present in the museum’s collections, the limits of painting and of the sign.

Marcel Alocco was born in 1937 in Nice, where he lives and works today. As a visual artist, magazine publisher, writer, and poet, he was influenced by the developments of semiology in the 1960s. After studying Humanities, he became acquainted with Ben and Arman and went on to take part in Fluxus, an international and informal movement aimed at bringing art and life closer together.
Connected to Supports/Surfaces (a French group exploring the deconstruction of the components of painting), since 1967 he has sought a way of painting differently – using objects, bed sheets and later ordinary fabrics, not mounted on a frame, suggesting the involvement of the body and manual work.
From 1973, the artist began creating the “Fragments de la Peinture en Patchwork”. In this series, the fabric is first stamped with iconic motifs (artistic or popular) before being torn into pieces and recomposed at random through sewing. The artist appeals to shared memory, testing the visual significance of representations. Two works in particular, “Le châssis comme image” and “Dé-tissages”, extended his research. To what extent can an image serve as a sign? What are the limits and excesses of painting? These are all questions that the artist has explored over the years.

In collaboration with the artist and with the support of L’Enseigne des Oudin – Endowment Fund

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