"Par la matière évidée, Allègre déchire l’étendue. Par les failles de l’espace, il échancre la matière. Il met en fleur des cicatrices d’humanité."

Christian Noorbergen

 

 

JOURNEY

Young Julien Allègre loves metals and likes to understand how things are put together; to unlock the mysteries, he starts to study mechanics. His love for playing percussions, however, takes him on a different road. Music in turn helps him weave connections with art in general. Expanding his universe and meeting other artists, he became interested in painting and sculpture, and his own creativity is awakened.

 

Father’s attic

From his childhood, Allègre remembers fondly playing in his father’s studio, an amateur painter and model builder, he had taken refuge in the attic. Allègre played with the tools and material, and derived great joy in demolishing parts of his father’s models, a forewarning of his future appetite for exploding found objects. Another family ritual will have a pleasurable percussive impact: to get Allègre-senior to come down from his ivory tower/studio, the family members would bang on the home’s pipes. The metallic resonances carried the voices of the living.

 

Tender metal

Not surprisingly, when Allègre started sculpting, he begins by using metal: to him a live and reactive matter that allies strength and elasticity. While visiting Senegal, in 2002, he discovers recycled art, and toys made from cans. Back in his studio, he uses old oil barrels, to create poetic beings. He strives to harmonize the metal, perceived as heavy and warrior like, and his own sensibility, deposited as an offering on the sheet metal. Allègre twists the metal to give it movement, and to structure the volumes. Then he adds definition and lines, using the bronze soldering as a pencil.