The artist
From the comic-strip bubble to the political rostrum.
It all began with an irreverent line. With Ligne Noire, Député went after the paper idols of Franco-Belgian comics, blowing apart the well-behaved frames of childhood with floods of bright flat colour and nervous splatters. That deconstruction of myth carried on into sound with Magnetic Memory, turning nostalgia for cult cassettes and rock into sculptural objects set under Plexiglas. With Figures d'État, painting leaves the shelter of pop icons and steps into the arena of power and flesh.
Before streaming, there were cassettes. We played them, played them again, and wound them back with a pencil until they wore out.
Velvet Underground, IAM, Nirvana, The Offspring, Pink Floyd, Daft Punk, Bowie, Gorillaz… musical madeleines that became Député's raw material.
That is where the artist comes from: a culture shaped by skateboarding, music, images and the alternative scene of the '90s and 2000s — a time when album sleeves, magazines, music videos, clothes and skate decks formed a single visual landscape. His paintings keep something of it: popular references, handled without fetishism.
Député takes these familiar objects, enlarges them, distorts them and rebuilds them in paint. Matter is central. It thickens, overflows, catches the light; relief, gesture and accident quickly pull the image away from mere reproduction. The industrial object becomes a unique, almost physical piece.
There is also a question of time — the time once spent playing an album on repeat until you knew every track, and the time it takes to make the painting. Another sense of time, well suited to an age where everything is consumed faster.
Then Député brings sound back into the work. Each painting is answered by a piece he plays on the piano: a free interpretation of the painting, its rhythm, its matter and what it evokes for him. A way of replaying his own culture without putting it under glass.
The collaboration with ALTO grew out of a shared taste for shadowy areas, signs and images that keep vibrating after the first glance. Where Député works with memory, sound and afterimage, ALTO brings a more instinctive, almost nocturnal matter. Around Mezzanine, their two worlds meet in a work that never gives itself away all at once.
ALTO is a French painter based in Toulouse. His work sits at the crossroads of figuration and abstraction, built on colour, matter and gesture.