Alain Bublex

Galerie George-Philippe and Natalie Vallois, Paris
Through November 4

Alain Bublex has fused his training as a designer and his passion for architecture with his art in a truly unique way. In this Parisian exhibition, Bublex once again proposes a series of works that offer exceptionally creative solutions for urban spaces, interior design and transport.

His most challenging piece is a take on the famous city project Plug-in. Led by Peter Cook in the early 1960s, a group of English architects from Archigram developed Plug-in as a utopian city to be built from habitable cells connected via an open network of infrastructures and basic services. In returning to this project, Bublex doesn’t merely draw on it in terms of graphics or form. His large scale urban landscapes show how Plug-in is no longer some utopian vision, but a reality that already exists.

At times the artist uses regular photos. At others, he digitally reworks them, inserting computer generated images onto photos of real buildings. Some scenes depict groups of building-site trailers (or, perhaps better, ‘living containers’) almost identical to those illustrated in the ‘plug in’ model. Others show multicolored containers, resembling pieces of Lego, set at different heights in reinforced concrete high-rises, or being transported by helicopter.

In another room of the gallery, several chipboard ‘furniture’ prototypes are on display. This time the conceptual point of departure is Le Corbusier’s theory on proportion, Modulor. The objects are bizarre but functional, such as a desk with shelves and wheels on various sides, which can be used in several positions (straight, overturned, horizontal). The curious nature of these pieces gives less the sensation of viewing a furniture exhibition than a sculpture installation.




Francesco Poli
Translation by Rosalind Furness