He is as long-legged and elongated, elegant and charming as his famous cats. Like Flaubert’s ‘Mrs Bovary is Me’. French artist and cartoonist Alain Séchas is presenting at one of my favourite museums in Belgium, BPS22 in Charleroi (a museum named after its own address) his exhibition ‘I am never bored…’ (Je ne m’ennuie jamais…). And the viewer believes in this maxim at first sight – the artist is interested in living in this world. You know his most famous in Belgium coquettishly curved on a bicycle Cat – on one of the central streets of Brussels (at the non-central entrance to the St.Hubert Gallery). Tourists love selfies and photos with this pop art heroine. Let’s meet her creator.
Alain Séchas is a school teacher of drawing (how lucky are the generations of his students) in the French city of Metz and then in the capital. His own education is L’ecole supérieure normale des arts appliqués in Paris (!). Naturally, in parallel with teaching, Alain created his own universe with Cats as its inhabitants. At the end of the 1990s, his model-like Cats with their mannered facial expressions and large eyes bulging in a cartoonish manner made him famous. The famous Brussels gallery ‘Albert Baronian’ played no small part in this, so the Belgian capital is like a hometown to the artist. Placed in absurd and comic situations, Cats (and then Martians) in an ironic manner touch upon topical social and cultural themes. Behind the external lightness, the thoughtful viewer guesses the conceptual and plastic depth of the statement. Alain Séchas can hardly be called a cartoonist, but he certainly draws codes from the 9th art – comics and cartoons.
The exhibition at BPS22 is created with great care for the viewer and in harmony with the ‘genius loci’. The artist plays with the formats of his sculptures to create a completely different relationship with space. He does this in such a French graceful way that the exhibition is viewed in one breath. The scenography is perfect. Sculptures, a gallery of caricatures, a mesmerising ‘flying Pig’, music as a medium. Alain Séchas avoided painting for a long time, but turned to it as a decoration designed to ‘contextualize’ the sculpture. Almost lifelike, Cats against a backdrop of abstract painting takes on a narrative.
In 1996, Alain Séchas created Le Chat Écrivain, an installation consisting of a sculpture and a painting that became central to his career: the young artist wrote a bombastic letter to his sister to express his pride in finally completing a convincing portrait of their family. Next to the Cat sculpture is a dominant portrait of his father. This work belongs to the Museum of Modern Art in Paris. The author’s literary associations, he said, should be sought in the works of Flaubert and Balzac. But I couldn’t escape the image of Tatiana writing a letter to Onegin.
‘I am never bored…’ keeps the viewer from getting bored. I was very happy to meet the God father of the Cats in person!’
