Discover the contemporary work of Alain MOLY
DRAWING FROM DREAMS, MEMORY AND THE UNCONSCIOUS
My name is Alain MOLY and I was born on August 1, 1964. My childhood is that of those who grew up in a working-class city. A simple childhood made of dreams. Not one of those dreams that could have taken me to luxurious, flashy and ultimately vulgar worlds, no, my childhood was made of contemplation and ordinary imaginary.
In primary school, middle school and then high school, I had no particular attraction to drawing and even less to painting. I was lucky enough to attend art and music classes since my results in the "main subjects" allowed me to. I liked these lessons but nothing more.
After the BAC comes, as for most of us, THE existential question: what am I going to do with my life? The career counselor suggests that I become an architect. It's a job, he tells me, where you have to be both rigorous and creative. Maybe he detected these qualities in me... go on, I'm going for it! Here I am, off to study architecture.
The years at the School of Architecture go by... After a first year where "conceptual" visual arts were required, I decided in the second year to move towards more "classical" and figurative art disciplines. Which is quite contradictory with my orientation for architectural subjects where I chose to engage in a resolutely contemporary and deconstructivist style. In short, one more contradiction in my life! In visual arts, I therefore moved towards reproducing plaster casts in charcoal, an introduction to color, awareness and verbalization of distance and relative size of elements (closer, further, closer than, further than, etc.), work on the perception of positions in space of an object in relation to another (above, below, in front, behind, over, under, etc.), the perception of an object with combined criteria (in front and larger, in front and smaller), etc. To guide us, excellent teachers such as the painters Robert THON and Michel Goedgebuer.
With an architect's degree in your pocket, a quick trip to the faculty to prepare a state thesis in urban policy and a graduate degree in law, military training, active service and then I found myself projected into the professional world as an architect in architectural firms. I remember the courses given at the School of Architecture barely 5 to 10 years old and the desire to draw and paint takes me, for no particular reason but rather as a nostalgia reflex. It is a feeling that can be perceived as being unpleasant because it is sad, but for me it is still a very positive feeling. Often I think either of people or events that are no longer there, but that were happy, and I tell myself that it is a chance, in life, to have happy memories!
Since then, I have never really stopped painting. But my work is very laborious, inconstant and inspiration is not often there. As a result, barely fifty paintings have been completed (some presented, exhibited, but none finished for me) and as many in the pipeline.
My painting is my personality. It is nostalgic, melancholic, dreamy, anxious, irritable. It is figurative, even if sometimes it happens to modify and distort reality, because it is always linked to real people or objects, present or having existed. It mocks closed networks, fashion and trends. It despises all forms of snobbery.
