Marcel Alocco
lives and works in Nice, where he has born on the 8th February 1937.
After doing a degree in French Litterature at the University of Aix-en-Provence, where his professors included Claude Pichois, Georges Duby, Raymond Jean, Georges Mounin, he returned to the practice of plastic art in the form of writing and an active participation in l'Ecole de Nice: firstly with the Fluxus movement, then betwen 1966 and 1970, in the creation of the aesthetic Supports-Surfaces.
During the first period, in the spirit of Fluxus, he produced works from a number of divers materials, then in 1967/68 he started working with bed sheets, and the transformation of forms confronted with the conditions of application, all whilst experimenting with " l'idéogrammaire " (the text-form relationship within a painting). For Alocco, the image is one of the fundamental components of the painting, and as he wrote " Toute peinture fait image " ie " every painting makes an image ".
From 1973 onwards, he elaborated his Fragments from Patchwork Painting: the material is painted, then torn, and finally put back toghether either by sewing or knitting. The colours, figures and linked supports are treated by same process, which fully marks his unique style in this domain. From 1980, the délicate unweaving of certain threads on the painted canvas intervened as a way of shifting the medium and the colour, and thus transforming the image.
Patchwork Painting is primarily painting. The most elementary technique in patchwork is the introduction of a continuous-discontinuous dialectic. It is seen as an opening tool for creation, as underlined by Michel Butor: " All your work is based on the tearing of the material. Neither the pieces taken out, nor the torn. There are neither scissors nor rips. The canvas is free to you in a different style to other painters, with the adges torn to shreds and fringed, which makes it communicate with the esterior ". (Catalogue Alocco, Musée d'Art Moderne et d'Art Contemporain, Nice 1993).
Exploration of the origines (and the archaic techniques) drove Marcel Alocco to his interest in the invention of weaving (according to the hypothesis of S. Freud) with womens hair. Since February 1995 he has examined painting with the colour medium of hair, developping fine miniatures of elementary weavings.
Parallel to this, Marcel Alocco took to the work of writing, between 1962 and 1965 conducting the review " Identités " and in 1967/68 " Open ". Amongst his publications, " Au présent dans le texte" novel'(PJ Oswald, Paris 1969), poems, essays, numerous articles, many to be found in " Des Ecritures en Patchwork " (Z'éditions, Nice 1987). More recently, he has published "Fragmentaires " (Editions Voix-Richard Meier, Montigny-les Metz, 1995), " Introduction à L'Ecole de Nice " (Editions Demaistre, Nice 1995), " Fragments d'un Cahier d'Atelier " (" Energia, recherches doctorales " n°3 Paris 1997) and " La promenade niçoise " ( Ed. L'Ormaie, Vence, 1999) (1999) "La Musique de la vie " (2002) (Ed. L'Ormaie, Vence), "Poèmes cyniques" (Gestes gratuits, Nice 2004), "Laerte ou la confusion des temps" (L'Amourier 2002) " … d'un âge sans mémoire" (L'Amourier 2007), " Poèmes du siècle XXI " ill. Michèle Brondello, Ed. La Diane Française, Nice 2008, "Paroles en travail " (Performarts, col. Gestes Gratuits 2009).
