Alain Vintenon

After a plastic arts baccalaureate, he began studies at the University of Provence in Aix-en-Provence in the Plastic Arts department. He obtained the CAPES in 1978 and taught in college until his retirement in 2016. During these years, he practiced painting, working on various themes.

For several years, he has worked mainly on the form of the altarpiece with or without shutters. Coming from Greek or Latin mythologies, biblical or evangelical, artistic or everyday, the stories he tells are inserted in this form derived from sacred art.

From iconostases to altar paintings, liturgies have very often used the exegetical power of the image in order to make the texts, the words, the gestures say more than they could say, more than what is perceptible in the moment. The altarpieces which “decorated” the altars of churches and chapels, due to their composition in several images (main image, images of the movable shutters, images of the predelles, sometimes sculptures) showed a story, linear at the base, of which the multiple links (shapes, colors, iconography) gradually unraveled its meaning and temporal and/or spatial rigidity.

His altarpieces are built on these bases, they are a meditation on our world, on its history and its stories, on the image we have of it and that we give ourselves, on that which is instilled in us by dominant models of thought. Neither obstinate refusal nor blissful approval, they are a critical look at the world which makes us in its image, which we make in our image, on its (self-) representations, on the sacralizations developed by the powerful iconographic clichés used as major tools to shape our thoughts, our desires, our vision.

There is a blurring of order and an absence of words so that the spectator can compose his own story which is not necessarily that of the artist. He likes the viewer to zigzag from one piece of the work to another to create their own journey. Its aim is not to blur the lines, but to propose several. From his story, several ways of telling a story arise, all on the same outline.