Who is Julien Allègre?

Young Julien Allègre loves metals and likes to understand how things are put together; to unlock the mysteries, he starts to study mechanics. His love for playing percussions, however, takes him on a different road. Music in turn helps him weave connections with art in general. Expanding his universe and meeting other artists, he became interested in painting and sculpture, and his own creativity is awakened. From his childhood, Allègre remembers fondly playing in his father’s studio, an amateur painter and model builder, he had taken refuge in the attic.

Allègre played with the tools and material, and derived great joy in demolishing parts of his father’s models, a forewarning of his future appetite for exploding found objects. Another family ritual will have a pleasurable percussive impact: to get Allègre-senior to come down from his ivory tower/studio, the family members would bang on the home’s pipes. The metallic resonances carried the voices of the living.

Tender metal

Not surprisingly, when Allègre started sculpting, he begins by using metal: to him a live and reactive matter that allies strength and elasticity. While visiting Senegal, in 2002, he discovers recycled art, and toys made from cans. Back in his studio, he uses old oil barrels, to create poetic beings. He strives to harmonize the metal, perceived as heavy and warrior like, and his own sensibility, deposited as an offering on the sheet metal. Allègre twists the metal to give it movement, and to structure the volumes. Then he adds definition and lines, using the bronze soldering as a pencil.

Antique beauty

Trips to Morocco, Vietnam, Thailand, India, and Australia, further inspire him and deepen his concerns about the scarcity of material and environmental factors at stake. It becomes evident to Allègre that he should create from raw material whose usage has no environmental impact; to create ex nihilo. In parallel, esthetically he strongly believes that beauty resides essentially in objects weathered by time. In 2008, he starts to explore another material: antique bronze. In a back and forth between the archaic and the contemporary, Allègre shows the world, our buried fears, and our ghost from the past.

Le Guen’s long love story with the US started in 1992, in the New York studio of Douglas Kolk. American artists inspire Le Guen with their visual rather than conceptual approach, and so does the street scene. He spray paints his letterisms and collages, stencils over them, and adds fluorescent paint, ink, or pieces of subway publicity posters, all techniques borrowed from the “Bad Painting” movement to which Jean-Michel Basquiat belonged

An artist connected to the world

The artist is driven by a thirst for renewal, and a quest for intensity on a daily base. Allègre sketches on a notebook are often the starting point from which he generates his sculptures. He also practices improvisation, not only as a sculptor, but also as a musician when he plays the hang or steel pan drum, an idiophone instrument invented in Switzerland. Always concerned about overwhelming world problems, Allègre is working on two new thematic: delusion and embarkation. The two are related: the delusion of those who refuse to see the world as it is, blinded by their protective denial; and the embarkation of those who leave everything and everyone, dreaming of an hospitable elsewhere. Those are often sad to find a cruel reality without mercy. Allegre wants to be a realistic dreamer, helping through his art to shape a better world.

n

Works or what makes Julien Allegre Unique

JulienAllegre
Detail of La Portee des chosesl
La Portee des choses
Libertad 2000
Libertad 2000 190cm x 90 x 70
ja-odyssee

Exhibitions

2014 : Jean-Paul Huftier & Julien Allègre, exposition Galerie P13, Heidelberg, Allemagne
2014 : Métalmorphose, exposition individuelle, Galerie Patrice Peltier, Paris
2013: Exposition individuelle, Galerie Au-delà des Apparences, Annecy
2012: Exposition individuelle, Galerie Les Robinsonnes, Antibes
2011: Exposition individuelle, Ferme des Arts, Vaison-la-Romaine
2010 : Exposition collective, MAC 2000, Paris