In Alexandre Gourçon’s work, each fold is an enigma guiding the writing of a silent poem driven by mysterious veils and buried desires.
The roots of his artistic initiation go back to his grandmothers, seamstresses who passed on to him far more than just a certain know-how: they inspired him to reclaim his identity through textile.
A living material worn on the body, textile, once fixed on a stretcher, takes on a new dimension, becoming an object of lasting contemplation. It is transformed into a surface for artistic expression, reinvented, sublimated, elevated to the status of a work of art marking the transition between the everyday and the sacred.
The folds are malleable, they can be pulled, opened up and structured. Alexandre uses his hands to bend them towards an ideal that brings to mind the ancient splendours of Greek statuary. This quest for perfection is deeply inscribed in the heritage of fashion, particularly that of Madame Grès, renowned for her rigour and sensitivity to an aesthetic at once simple, elegant and pure.
The artist’s quest is a ceaseless examination of form, moving from textile to wood, raffia and now stone. In search of new expressions, he began looking for ways to ‘fold space’. Whether in Madagascar, the department of Creuse or his studio in Paris, he explores, creates and pushes back the limits of materials, accompanied by artisan sculptors, to generate new lifelines.
The folds, through shadow effects, make visible what remains hidden. This is an intimate narrative, an act of revelation. Light, a discreet accomplice, plays a fundamental role in Alexandre Gourçon’s art, transforming and giving life to the folds, to drapery and to relief. Light becomes his silent language. The colours he chooses are deliberately pure, raw and at times dull: they don’t yet give off any scent, as if they still had to remain neutral to blossom at the moment of the epiphany of the pleat. There, stretched on a frame, the work is transformed to reveal its symphony.
The canvases form a vast puzzle, each becoming a piece of the artist’s personal history. His folds reflect the world as it endlessly folds and unfolds, from geological movements to the wrinkles of the body, from the draping of clothes to the folds of water. In his work, the pleat evokes the movement of human existence, embodied memory, a dance between presence and absence. The fold becomes the silent voice that tells intimate stories, a universal artistic language that transcends words and speaks to the soul: visual poetry in which each fold is a stanza taken up in an immobile dance, frozen in time.