Alarm of freedom
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60x70cm
2024
Alarm of Freedom is a powerful work, both minimalist and intense, a pictorial alert. It does not ask to be looked at, it imposes itself. The gesture is frank, decisive, almost brutal, but not without subtlety in the textures, layers, and voids.
At first glance, the composition evokes a mask, an armored face, or a visor—perhaps an allegory of resistance or a contemporary avatar of the warrior. The whole is dominated by two slanted bars, one blue, the other red, which fly over a black, heavy, almost threatening cross-shaped form. This chromatic triptych (blue-white-red) immediately conjures up national references—France, but also more broadly the ideals of liberty, equality, and struggle. Yet here, there is nothing glorious or solemn: this flag seems scratched, deformed, as if blown by a shock wave.
The material itself is vibrant. The central white is not flat, but nuanced, cracked in places, suggesting the fragility of a varnish, the surface of a fissured territory. The background is hazy, smoky, evoking tear gas or ashes. There is a tension in this work between silence and cry, between abstraction and symbol. Everything is a sign without being explicit, making it a work to be read slowly, almost political, but without slogans.
The gesture is assertive but not demonstrative. We sense a painter who rejects chatter, who carves into the material and meaning with the same urgency. Alarm of Freedom does not illustrate a concept, it provokes it. The alarm is visual, plastic, frontal. It does not seek to seduce, but to awaken.