Alione

ALIONE OR THE ART OF TRAVELING FROM THE INSIDE

Just a stone's throw from Paris, Alione's workshop blazes with colors like a Bengal fire! In the tree-lined path, a majestic walnut tree watches over the work spaces, the most imposing of which is outdoors, spray painting required. We find with joy the work of someone who immersed himself in this art “with strength, rage and determination”. A time shaken by the stimulating explosion named Basquiat, the artist soon marveled at the molten colors of Van Gogh and Gauguin: a fascination. Alione's work, combining the impulse of raw art, the commitment of street art and the poetry of comics, was quickly noticed at MacParis, the essential contemporary creation fair. Today, a demanding and passionate gallery owner opens up a wider horizon for him: New York and London. A great challenge, a new impetus. That's good, Alione likes beautiful spaces: vast lofts, old bistros, architecture with large bay windows. The artist reinvents these large interiors – with panorama – in clever colorful plans and refined lines. Alione works on her own stencils, tape and scalpel in hand, the aerosol will later deliver its alchemy on the canvas. A style now identifiable among all by its light and its composition.

We know that the Interior Portrait as a pictorial genre will find its apogee in
Nineteenth century. However, academic theatricality – long dominant – would end up directing the genre towards decline over the centuries that followed. These representations were generally limited to documentary rendering or purely descriptive pictorial work, with a predilection for watercolor. These paintings were most often the result of commissions intended to represent the sumptuous habitats of the aristocratic classes of the time.
None of that at Alione, as you can imagine! Even if the artist reconnects – in his own way – with this major artistic movement by giving it a radically new breath. Alione revives the genre, renews the approach and creates a resolutely graphic project, with an urban intention, a sober pop-rock inspiration, or a sensitivity more connected with our contemporary imaginations. But it is above all through the skilful use of techniques that I would describe as aero-solar that the artist innovates: a sharp handling of 21st century chromatic materials. This is how the painter deploys on canvas his original palette and his unique vision as a worthy heir of artists from graffiti such as Keith Haring or Jean-Michel Basquiat to name but a few. As the history of art is always expanding and creating intimate echoes, we find in Alione the taste for the black line which structures the canvas in the manner of a Combas or even a Buffet. But the supremacy of color initiated by “Fauvism” remains no less present for those who have long admired the quartet Derain, Gauguin, Matisse, Van Gogh.
Yet the polyphonic Alione rejects classifications, he imbues himself as much with the enigmatic imagination of a Magritte as with the radically refined forms found in the still lifes of a certain Picassso, the mastery of colored harmonies remaining his concern constant. But Alione is very much of her time, both in the cultural references and in the popular quotes which radiate her compositions.
If the muffled mark of a Roy Lichtenstein – and therefore of the Pop Art movement – can make
reminiscence here or there, Alione is above all a rare artist of the aerosol can. A creator with a unique touch, with this very particular light which belongs to him and which always powerfully envelops this multiple, festive and infinite game of “interior scenarios”.
Inventor of form, Alione definitively appropriates these new spaces and sanctuaries them through the generosity of images and symbols which burst onto the canvas like great flashes of joy and color. Thus celebrating a new era, a new chapter in the native history of Pressureism, this original movement which knew so well how to find its unique path and its distinct place by differentiating itself from Graffiti art.
Alione’s Interior Portraits never cease to seduce, amaze and intrigue. Here is the reason.
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 designer or vintage furniture, it's up to us to divine fragments of destiny in these spaces which teem with familiar clues, with breathtaking views of Elsewhere. Here, a glass of champagne sparkles, a started book pauses, strangely exotic plants thrive, a guitar abandons itself, a saxophone patiently, a sofa offers its tender motifs.
There, tubes of colors and pots of paint set the tone. There, a childhood toy or a card inviting you to take a big trip flashes. .Alione's world is a soothing tumult, a harmonic bazaar, a grandiose disorder that resembles Life: a delicious dizziness!
Let us then let ourselves be caught up in this fabulous whirlwind of pictorial quotations which make sense and give a beautiful take-off to this work framed as in the cinema, and yet outside the frame by its singular force. Alione stages scenarios of a daily life – haunted – inhabited by the history of art, in a dizzying mise en abyme! Here the eye stumbles upon a Basquiat, focuses on a Monet, catches a glimpse of a Matisse, is surprised by a Van Gogh, delighted by a Wahrol or moved by a Klimt. We are at home with the artist, with others, at home. And we begin to dream far away in front of these immense windows open onto the dreaming city, the watching monument or the dancing cloud.
Free electron and recognized figure of the movement called Pressureism – code name for graffiti art – Alione masters the chromatic magic of the aerosol as much as the intensity of the framing or the shimmer of the textures: an impressive art. Instinctively, he exerts the exact pressure to obtain this vibrant light, still urban but already internalized with a view to the radiance specific to each painting. Then the canvas comes to life and we are amazed spectators of a theater deserted of its characters in the hallucinated setting opening onto the infinity of Time.
But let's make no mistake, Alione's painting is not only decorative or narrative beauty, it is also a meditative work: an active contemplation. Alione’s act of painting nonetheless remains pure energy and abundant romance. Because each interior made in Alione reveals a unique story, a unique film: a presence. An invitation to a great journey into the “interiors”.
A mysterious, immediate, profound work. Infinitely human.


Anthony Campo