Introduction
by Laurence Carducci
Attentive with the multitude of the beings, visible or not, which composing the biosphere, the alive skin of planet, Alex Rabus works intuitively to fix in its imposing fabrics of the worlds imbricated one in another, without apparent order, nor definite limits. Through this attentive exploration and rebukes, plants and animals are plain in a vast fraternity of existence. The harmonized colors allow the creatures which populate the tables of camou fl er, and to seek the shade or the light. The images generate the ones the others, bud, swarm, in a fabulous digest. Hidden in a dream of naturalist, the artist observes this expansion with passion, greed and a filled with wonder innocence, near sometimes to Douanier Rousseau. It is necessary to very follow close the fine screens of graphics anything to lose small sketches, sometimes funny which dissimulate there readily.
Generous storyteller, Alex Rabus involves in a plentiful universe of metaphors and emotions, populated sudden images. The slapping of the tail of the alligator cohabits with the rubbing of a frog and the squeaking of the insect causes a sound blue in the heart of the fl eur. This extraordinary drift also involves in a legendary past through castles and citadels, where monsters and geniuses are guessed slipping into the night. The pictorial fabric lengthily elaborate captures the unperceivable one thus patiently.
This work of impregnation lets work be done, like a vegetable growth, while being constituted as flow of information. With an audacity and an originality which N ` belong that has him, transcribed Alex Rabus of the concepts of the time, most impossible to transmit between all. All its work takes part in it by its principle even: the choice to spend the years on the same fabric. Colors in hand, it makes resistance. While at the same time it very clearly announces the fast destruction of whole pieces of the alive heritage, it refuses to yield with the declamatory effects of artistic manifestos, to work as a recluse and to show only exceptionally its works. On the other hand, the man of passion intervenes all the same, when the image suf fi T more, the letters of reader of which several are reproduced in this work prolongs the pictures.
In the workshop, the patient and meticulous enumeration, subjected to the respectful description of the beauty of the world, often contrasts with signals D ` alarm. Serenity so much required does not have any more course and nature, however powerful is it, blanches in the vicinity of the contemporary man. A deaf anger lives the painter in the series of Orphées which resounds of a devastating laughter and which carries the claw of the revolt in front of the standardization of planet and the often grotesque aspect of our “civilized” behaviors. In Speeding (1991 have 1995), the man who was a large innocent monkey draws aside the arms in a gesture of love and worship, an attitude of cruci fi é also, in the middle of the general sacrifice.
The refuge of contemplation returns during its recent time. The last table, devoted has Areuse, offers the simplicity of its water to plunge in a zone of clearness and to forget the close fences, the lattices and the aligned tracks where cylinders and pistons howl, All is still there, within reach of perception. But is this really Areuse? The artist does not define banks, painting could as well suggest an intergalactic cloud. All is still there, as at the origin, carried perception, in an intimate face have-face with the essential components, delivered time. It is an evocation of before and of the after-passage of the human ones, which are not qu ` a transitory episode and perhaps of no importance.