Une rencontre…

 

De Marie Madeleine Carbon

 

 

Il habite en dessus de la baie de Nice. Son appartement c’est son atelier, son four se dresse sur la grande terrasse qui domine la mer .Il vit tout près de ses terres cuites, bronzes, dernières oeuvres en gestation encapuchonnées de sacs en plastic qu’il veille même en dormant.

 

Atelier de sculpteur dont les œuvres surprennent par ce côté surréaliste, mythique, hors du temps et de l’effervescence d’une vie grouillante et bruyante juste en bas. Il vit au premier étage. La première impression c’est cette recherche d’équilibre toujours incertaine , mais à y bien regarder, à bien y voir, bien rivée à la terre, à la terre mère peut-être !

 

De ces magmas en jaillissent toujours des bras tentaculaires, des vides, des pleins, des embryons, (lui-même reconnait qu’ils évoquent un monde foetal, presque mutant) sortant de leur enclos, où la langue se délie peu à peu de la matière, cherche sa voix, se referme sur la vie, sur le premier cri.

 

La matière n’en n’a terminé avec ses propres découvertes : on aperçoit soudain des corps qui se cherchent, des empoignades féroces, des fusions de couples enlacés, leur distance incertaine.

J’ai vu des corps, des bouches aux aboies, des appels au secours, la vie aux aguets cherchant son socle, son origine, son équilibre .

 

J’ai vu en haut des jardins exotiques de Eze, étincelant dans l’acier et la lumière de l’été brûlant, sa subtile sculpture où les rayons du soleil couchant découpent en creux une silhouette féminine « Europe » allongée sur Zeus métamorphosé en Minotaure, évoquant le mythe grec. (Serait ce aussi un clin d’oeil à Notre Europe cherchant paix et réconciliation)?

 

J’ai vu 3.000 ans d’histoire du petit d’homme inventant les jeux du cirque, les funambules, les équilibristes défiant la pesanteur, sûrs et confiants au-dessus du compère qui les portent.

J’ai deviné que Marc ne s’arrêtera pas là, entre les pièces jouant avec la mythologie, les symboles et l’oiseau de paix, le temps qu’il faut pour nous surprendre, nous apprivoiser dans nos yeux soudain décillés.

 

Toute la sculpture de Marc Albaranes me semble sous-tendue par une culture aux prises avec nos origines, notre culture et aussi par tout un cheminement de ses études de biologie.

 

MMCarbon, le 3 Mars 2014

 

l'oiseau allégorique

Objets: 1 - 1 Sur 1

For Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art

In an art world increasingly dominated by spectacle, irony, and the rapid circulation of images, the work of Marc Albaranes stands as a quiet but forceful reminder that the deepest function of art is not to entertain the eye but to reorganize the psyche. His sculptures, drawings, and paintings do not merely occupy space; they reactivate a primordial memory, a psychic stratum older than culture itself. In this sense, Albaranes belongs to the lineage of artists who resist the postmodern flattening of meaning and instead pursue what Donald Kuspit has called aesthetic depth-the capacity of art to reveal the inner life.

Albaranes' sculptural language is unmistakably biomorphic. The forms evoke ancient civilizations-African, Cretan, Cycladic-not as stylistic quotations but as archetypal echoes. These shapes feel excavated rather than invented, as if the artist were unearthing entities that had been waiting beneath the surface of consciousness. The feminine curves, animal presences, and totemic silhouettes are not figurative; they are psychic organisms, embodiments of what the early psychoanalysts described as the "inner object." Their rounded masses and pierced voids enact a drama between fragmentation and repair, between the fear of dissolution and the longing for unity.

The interplay of void and fullness is central to Albaranes' sculptural vocabulary. The openings carved into the forms are not absences but breathing spaces, thresholds through which the viewer senses the tension between interiority and exteriority. The solid volumes, by contrast, assert a grounded presence, a will to endure. This dialectic recalls the earliest human attempts to give shape to the invisible forces of life and death. Albaranes does not impose form upon matter; he negotiates with it, allowing the clay, bronze, or steel to retain its primal energy.

This spiritual dimension is not religious but ontological. It arises from the artist's physical engagement with the earth-modeling clay as a way of reconnecting with origins, with the tactile memory of the world. In an era of digital dematerialization, this return to the hand, to the weight of matter, is itself a radical gesture. Albaranes' sculptures do not seek to dominate space; they seek to belong to it, to inhabit it with humility and intensity.

His drawings and paintings extend this metaphysical inquiry. The female nudes, rendered with a deliberate innocence, are not bodies but emanations-figures suspended between dream and waking. Their simplicity is deceptive: beneath the apparent naiveté lies a profound emotional condensation. The chromatic harmonies, at times reminiscent of Nicolas de Staël, do not imitate but parallel his search for essential form. Albaranes uses color as a means of stabilizing psychic turbulence, transforming raw feeling into luminous structure.

What makes his work distinctly contemporary is its refusal of cynicism. Albaranes does not participate in the postmodern game of quotation and detachment. Instead, he insists on the possibility that art can still be a transformative act, a way of healing the fractures of the self. His sculptures are not objects of consumption; they are sites of reconciliation, where the archaic and the modern, the instinctual and the reflective, the material and the spiritual converge.

In this sense, Marc Albaranes is not merely a sculptor or painter. He is a psychic cartographer, mapping the terrain where the human psyche meets the ancestral memory of form. His work reminds us that art, at its most vital, does not comment on the world-it recreates it from within.

Monaco, D K. 2019