Nationality France Name Jean-Max Albert | Role Writer Books Lithium migrants | |
Full Name Jean-Max Louis Albert Known for Painting, Sculpture, Literature, | ||
Jean-Max Albert is a painter, sculptor, writer, and musician. He has published theory, artist's books, a collection of poems, plays and novels inspired by quantic physics. He perpetuated a reflexion initiated by Paul Klee and Edgar Varèse on the transposition of musical structures into formal constructions. He created plant architectures which come close to site-specific art, environmental sculpture and generative art.
Contents
- Biography
- Painting
- Monumental sculpture
- Observation sculptures Sculptures de vises
- Anamorphosis
- Books
- Poetry
- Theatre
- Articles
- Videos
- Choreographies and compositions
- Individual
- Participations
- Public Collections
- References
Biography
Jean-Max Albert French: [ʒɑ̃maks albɛʁ] was born in 1942, in Loches, France. He studied at the Ecole Régionale des Beaux-Arts d'Angers then at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Paris, with frequent visits to the Louvre, across the river (cf An Afternoon in the Louvre). His student friends introduced him to the works of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, Louis Kahn, and Carlo Scarpa. Albert was also a trumpet player (1962–64), joining Henri Texier’s quintet with Alain Tabarnouval in the beginnings of Free Jazz. The group performed in clubs, festivals and concerts.
In 1975 he initiated the group show Serres in François Horticultural Greenhouses, Magny-in-Vexin. Sculptor Mark di Suvero invited him to New York City, the first of many visits to United States. In 1981 he met Sara Holt, whose sculpture and photographs were inspired by astronomy. They collaborated and carried out various public art projects. Travels in Europe, North Africa, Middle East.
In 1985 he took part to Ars Technica Association connected to the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie uniting philosophers, artists, scientists such as Jean-Marc Levy-Leblond, Claude Faure, Sara Holt, Piero Gilardi, Jean-Claude Mocik, reflecting on the relationship between art and new technologies. In 1990, he was commissioned by the architects Wylde-Oubrerie as collaborating artist for the realisation of Miller House in Lexington. Then invited to give lectures and workshops for the University of Architecture of Kentucky and then for the Art Center of Design in Pasadena.
Edgar Varese, in his comments, often refers to solid geometry and György Ligeti to static music. His experience in the musical field enabled Jean-Max Albert to exchange on these subjects with musicians such as : György Ligeti, Steve Lacy, Barney Wilen, François Tusques. He creates monumental trellis-works : Iapetus (1985) which refers to the structure of Thelonious Monk's ‘’Misterioso’’ », Ligeti (1994), which refers to Ligeti’s «static sonorous surfaces». A book and exhibition followed : Thelonious Monk Architecte (2001). A collaboration with pianist and composer François Tusques results in 80 short films: Around the Blues in 80 Worlds (2008). With Jean-Claude Mocik, he is coauthor of the project Midi-Pile started in 1994.
Beside sculptures related to music, he conceived a project dedicated to the vegetation itself, in terms of biological activity. The utopian Calmoduline Monument is based on the property of a protein, calmodulin, to bond selectively to calcium. Exterior physical constraints (wind,rain, etc.) modify the electric potential of the cellular membranes of a plant and consequently the flux of calcium. However, the calcium controls the expression of the calmoduline gene. The plant can thus, when there is a stimulus, modify its « typical » growth pattern. So the basic principle of this monumental sculpture is that to the extent that they could be picked up and transported, these signals could be enlarged, translated into colors and shapes, and show the plant’s « decisions ». This permanent show, installed in a public place, would suggest a level of fundamental biological activity.
Painting
Portraits of the Loire ; Framing Sculptures ; Que voit-on quand on ne regarde pas ? (What do you see when you are not looking?) or subjects more episodical: Memories of a Train Journey, Thelonious Monk Architect, Afternoon in the Louvre or The Carpenters’ Design, Albert’s painting are not limited to a particular style. He likes to cite Chinese masters of the classical period, mentioned by Matisse who taught the student to identify with his subject: to paint the tree in its expansion, the rock in its rugged massiveness and mentions that the precept can be also found in General semantics by Alfred Korzybski: "To be efficient, a language should be similar in its structure to the structure of the event it is supposed to represent". This idea that an artwork should be autonomous — epoch and even author's identity, taking second place — has provoked vigorous discussions with artists friends, notably with painter Joan Mitchell.
Monumental sculpture
Around 1973, a meeting with the architect Louis Kahn, led him to compare the relationship between paint and canvas with that of vegetation on trellis. Jean-Max Albert then revisited the tradition of trellis-work, 18th-century utopic architecture and, finally, created vegetal architecture which came close to Land art and Environmental Sculpture. It was comparable to the work of Gordon Matta-Clark, or Nils Udo, his neighbour in the Wissenschaftszentrum exhibition in Bonn in 1979. From Vicenza at the Hôtel de Sully, Paris, 1975 (in collaboration with Fougeras Lavergnolle) until the project O=C=O for the "Parco d' Arte Vivente" in Torino, 2007 (by way of the Festival of the Gardens of Chaumont, 1996), Albert created many architectural and vegetal sculptures on trellis-work in the field of Site-specific art, Environmental sculpture and Generative art.
Observation sculptures (= Sculptures de visées)
While monumental sculpture is meant to be installed within an urban or rustic space, Albert’s Observation Sculpture aims to concentrate the surrounding environment in the sculpture. When looking in the Observation Sculpture through its sights (an aperture or circles), the space beyond is (roughly) framed. Combining the different perspectives framed, the little sculpture, usually in bronze, takes shape after the space it is aiming at. An Observation Sculpture proposes a summary of this space concentrated, agglomerated and stuck together in a kind of core, like a geometric model of the site’s character.
Anamorphosis
Albert realized Un carré pour un square, Cube fantôme and Reflet anamorphose, three pieces according to anamorphosis principle as described by Matilde Marcolli : « If the vector space one starts with is the 3-dimensional space, whose vectors have 3-coordinates v = (x1, x2, x3), then, as long as v is nonzero and a real number λ is also nonzero, the vector v = (x1, x2, x3) and the vector λv = (λx1, λx2, λx3) point along the same straight line and we consider them as being the same point of our projective space. »