"The world is made up of small territories placed next to one another […]. A picture is like a single word. To make a phrase, you need many words, many pictures." Jean-Michel Alberola's work orchestrates disparate elements – big and little, the banal and the profound, the adult and the childlike, greatness and mediocrity, wise aphorisms and popular graffiti slogans – to create an ironic artistic universe that stimulates the viewer's perception and innermost thoughts.
His latest exhibition, organised by the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès at the Forum in Tokyo, formed a natural pendant to his earlier show in 2006, at La Verrière in Brussels.
The Tokyo show featured large-format wall paintings created in situ, together with drawings, installations, sculptures and bizarre objects – small blocks of metro tickets stuck together with paint, the leavings of a population on the move. Or an anvil encased in a beautifully made leather sheath – a tribute to the craftsman's skilled hand, inseparable in the artist's mind from the power of thought.
With support from the Fondation d'entreprise Hermès – and complementing the unique, ephemeral wall paintings destined to disappear once the exhibition closed – Jean-Michel Alberola has created three permanent frescoes for the public areas of the new French embassy in Tokyo.
