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Artworks:

Alain Huck

Fraction, 2009
charcoal on paper
151.0 x 218.0 cm
Hallucinatory visions, places that are haunted by absence, enigmatic forests, Alain Huck’s landscapes seep into the warp and woof of thought like spectres from the past. Between recollections and dreams, they proclaim to us the blackness of the world whilst sublimating it through the virtuosity of their technique.

Starting with found or photographed images, the artist captures in coal dust places that display a strange simplicity yet emit an energy that is forceful enough to disturb and absorb Huck during the long months he takes to execute his drawings. A stick of charcoal, that bit of burnt wood that already shows the trace of time, makes it possible to achieve that precise line and deep black tones that alternate with misty effects.

After painstakingly tracing out his subject, Huck blurs the image with a kind of veil, which is the mark of the prints left by his fist or arm, and peoples the drawing with many signs of a physical presence: “…the moment the image is very clear, with sharp contrasts, I quickly work the whole surface as if I were erasing it, but I bring out a new image, one where there is that presence of light, shadow and dizzying sensation”.

The boughs covered with snow in Fraction are strewn over the ground like fossils from a forgotten time, prisoners of the ash that has frozen them there. In Génération, the photographic precision of the rendering lends an almost brilliant shine to the heaped stones. The winding path represents the trace of a story, a touch of lived experience, the metaphor of an imminent evanescence, on its way to disappearing. Presence-absence, disappearance-destruction, whiff of death and melancholic hope, the whole of Huck’s work is haunted by the obscurity of a consciousness that knows it will not escape it own end. Between persistence and the fleeting, his drawings are both dazzling and dark.
Alain Huck, Fraction, 2009