Artworks

Alé de Basseville’s work unfolds as a sustained investigation into power, embodiment, and representation across painting, photography, and mixed media. Refusing clear boundaries between art, fashion, politics, and myth, his practice treats the image as a site of tension rather than resolution.

Beginning in painting, de Basseville developed a physical and ritual approach to image-making. Working seated on the floor, using charcoal mixed with water and layered with vinyl paint, he embraces gravity, chance, and erosion as active forces. Figures emerge and dissolve between abstraction and apparition, evoking mythic, political, and existential states rather than fixed identities. The process itself—primal and synthetic—becomes inseparable from meaning.

Photography followed not as documentation, but as a continuation of this inquiry by other means. In his photographic work, bodies appear neither posed nor narrated; they are held in states of exposure, withdrawal, and confrontation. Celebrity, fashion, and intimacy are treated as materials rather than subjects, systems to be destabilized. The gaze is present, but never sovereign.

Across decades, de Basseville’s work forms a coherent archive rather than discrete series: an ongoing examination of possession, control, hybridity, and resistance. Human and animal, flesh and symbol, intimacy and violence coexist without hierarchy. Myth is not illustrated but inhabited; politics are not declared but inscribed in posture, material, and refusal.

Alé de Basseville’s oeuvre resists categorization and market logic. It positions art not as spectacle or commodity, but as a sovereign act one that confronts systems of visibility while remaining irreducible to them