Alain Séchas
Alain Séchas - color me, 2016
Série n°1
Semiose éditions
The story of Alain Séchas and his cats is a very long one. Anyway, it would probably be more accurate to describe them as "characters with cats' heads" because apart from this peculiarity, they act just like ordinary people: cooking, watering the garden, watching TV, going camping and walking the dog.
What was that?
A cat walking a dog? These strange happenings might just explain why Séchas' cats always look so confused as if they don't understand exactly what they're doing there. Or they might just be wearing animal masks, like in Aesop's fables, to make fun of us humans. Indeed, that cat really does seem human... all too human!
Alain Séchas
Like the cat that feature in many of his works, Alain Séchas has enjoyed several artistic lives. Born in Colombes in the Paris suburbs in 1955, Séchas moved to the city itself and began working with a variety of different media; neon, film? He first came to the public eye in the 90s due to his comic book inspired characters (green Martians and feline bipeds). Plastered across walls like anti-slogans or reproduced as 3 dimensional figures (sculpted in resin, sometimes of monumental proportions), these characters act as the artist?s alter ego racked by the torments of modern society: cats as boxers, writers or even baby Hitlers, his work is full of dark humour. Since 2009, Alain Séchas has almost exclusively devoted himself to painting. This bifurcation veers towards gestural abstraction, in which more recently the famous cats (such redoubtable pests) have begun to reappear. The artist was exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2012) and his works can be found in the collections of numerous institutions (MAMCO in Geneva, various regional FRAC, Centre Pompidou in Paris).