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As the artist Jean-Michel Alberola (b. 1953, lives and works in Paris) sees it, the painter resists to the disappearance of meaning. In doing so, he acts, explodes the aporias of reality, disputes the visible, restores the memory of places and things, enters into a dialogue with artists from throughout the ages. Jean-Michel Alberola develops an archipelago-shaped mental and committed geography intended to shed light on the western world’s individual and collective memory. He embellishes any truth thrust upon us so as to designate intermediate spaces, places of contact and exchange.

In April 2013, Jean-Michel Alberola installed Cristal (2012), a new work in the form of a placard, in the Palais de Tokyo’s atrium, near the museum’s cafeteria. Aware that it is impossible today to conceive of utopian aspirations, Jean-Michel Alberola devised La Salle des Instructions in April 2012, a waitingroom in which visitors can converse in the present tense, thus regenerating the space itself. In the 200-sq. m. of this magnificent room with its glass roof, he deploys intense colors, transforming the place into a song in color.

The sentences written here become injunctions that can be read from a personal, philosophical, often even a political standpoint. They conjure up situations and actions mingling administrative functionality, literary references, oxymorons, etc. Included in this illustrated verbal content are: “Measure the gap”, “The question of power is the only answer”, “The exit is inside”, “Resume the conversation”, “The local’s turn to speak”, “The only state of my ideas”, “The preciseness of wasteland”, “Becoming a grain of sand”, “Becoming a guide dog for the blind”, “Becoming a pellitory of the wall”, “The fluency of childhood exchange no longer runs”, “Group lighting”—a neon formalizes a possible, a necessary “contradiction.”