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It is a journey through materials and techniques that Alex Bloc has patiently led since his beginnings some twenty years ago.

 

This has resulted in a prolific body of work from which emerges his fascination for the geometric motif. This practice is part of an ambition that is already a century old, whether it be that of op'art - optical art - of course, but also, more broadly, of constructivism, minimalism, the De Stjil movement or even neoplasticism and brutalism.

The grid, the oblique, the diagonal perpetuate this painting "creator of space-time" dear to the master of the De Stjil movement, Theo Van Doesburg, whose layout Alex Bloc admired from a very young age in the Aubette hall (1928) in Strasbourg.

 

Discovering Vasarely, François Morellet, Daniel Buren, Georges Rousse, and the Japanese concept of Wabi-Sabi, he quickly deviated from the graffiti scene that he assiduously frequented at the beginning of the century to concentrate on work on canvases and gallery installations, without neglecting intervention on pre-existing sites.

 

Integrating the digital tool to his research and exploration of forms and renderings, he shapes materials, metal, wood, paper, canvas, acrylic, spray, ink, sand, concrete, he apprehends and associates each material as a new source of inspiration, fighting or accommodating its constraints. By reworking by hand, by re-cutting and reassembling the elements produced, he then shapes a millimeter concept in a juxtaposition of tests and attempts until he obtains the idea that he pursues as that, recurring, to bring out a 3rd dimension from a flat surface.

Either very concretely by creating a bas-relief or by optical illusion.

 

For his works in situ, in places that have pre-existed his intervention, Bloc respects the main rules of the installation whether it is ephemeral or not: taking into account the immediate environment, the space, the history of the place in order to create a dialogue between the context, the work itself (as Daniel Buren would say) and the viewer, the one who looks at the new set.

Playing with perspectives, vanishing lines, visual codes and perception becomes the ultimate way to arrange a form of visual poetry, abstract and purely graphic. Beyond the signature, it is a gesture which is multiplied, integrates research and randomness in the work to provide a singular and recognizable work between all.

 

To the technological character of his creative process, respond the influences of nature, of its changing and elusive beauty. To the incredible diversity of light on the ocean, the mountain and even on some buildings that some would consider derisory and uninteresting, Alex Bloc proposes an apparent but fragile order with its rectilinear forms, but always modified by the irregularity of a material, its resistance to the production process or the simple trembling of its own hand.

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