Jean Allemand  (1948 -  )

JEAN ALLEMAND

Jean Allemand was born in France.

Founder of the SPACE GROUP with Maxime Defert and Michel Guéranger.

“Let there be no mistake about it: Jean Allemand’s spatial abstraction is, in no way, a continuation of kinetic art; neither does it draw life from the sources of Op Art.” - Michel Eyriey

“Jean Allemand’s poetic force (and that of the Space Group of which he is one of the masters, along with Defert and Gueranger) lies in discovering a geometrical vocabulary and an original technique for tracing out the expressive ways of this impulse characterizing imagination at this particular moment in history.” - André Parinaud

“Like a glittering jewel, Prism lay in the heart of the desert. Time had stopped for it: days and nights skimmed the vitrified desert’s surface, but for Prism there was always the same steely blue twilight and darkness never came.” - Michel Lancelot

“My encounter with Jean Allemand was brought about by the obligation of military service and the hazard of assignment. I got to know him in his home town, well before painting had become his principal activity. Our meeting, which was to be decisive on a professional level, took place in 1972, at the “Old and Young People Today” exhibition, where each of us was exhibiting work which had evolved concurrently and which stood clearly apart from the other goemetrically inclined exhibition. The canvasses which were on show prefigured the creation of the Space Group. The main heads of our work were already established: the primary weightless forms in Gueranger’s work, the depth of field in Allemand’s and the forms set in the top of the picture contrasting with the void in the bottom, as far as my own was concerned. In 1975, by mutual agreement, we founded the Space Group, conscious of the fact that this work, then accomplished in isolation, would only find force and impact in a joint effort.” - Maxime Defert

“The painters, Jean Allemand, Maximme Defert, Michel Gueranger and certain others as well, were the children of surrealism and op art, which they combined in their work, relations and ambitions, until then considered contradictory. In actual fact, surrealism was eager to open up space for painting within the limits of consciousness. The boundless space which someone like Dali or Tanguy opened up in their canvasses was one of timelessness, of desire, of everything imaginable.” - Jean-jacques Leveques

Michel Faucher

“The arrangenent of the forms on the canvass creates a strange vibrating effect. Is it because they are exaggerated or perhaps because of some intense sensation afforded by abstraction and total freedom?”

Jean Allemand (response)

“I use a three-dementional language to express an abstract, almost physical, idea of emotion, giddiness, a state of weightlessness, and speed, in a space which is foreign to terrestrial reality. That’s one reason inclining me to believe that my paintings appeal more to abstraction than representation. Through their articulation, the forms which are to be found in my paintings create a feeling of abstraction. That’s the real paradox in my approach, only the representations enthusiasts consider me to be abstract. The elements making up the canvases: slab, structure, light, are not important in themselves, they become essential for showing up the darkness, that is, the void. The canvas is brought to life by the tension created the static and dynamic elements, their relationship suggests the void. The slab, which is often tilting, emphasizes the lack of balance. With the disappearance of the vanishing line, evolution takes place in a weightless space. We are concerned with a picture in which we move about. The central point on the canvas being this invisible, though ever present, opposition between the two forms.”