Alfonse Alt

Alfonse Alt was born in 1962 in Illertissen (DE), he lives and works in Marseille (FR)

[…] One can say that Alfons Alt’s work fits neither within the definition of Painting nor within that of Photography, because the two expressions wish to become one. They find their aporetic therefore awkward resolution in the expression coined by the artist himself to name his work: the “Altotype.” A process of which he has become both the holder and the culmination, which has become a style, a signature, a “trademark” left by pigment on the photographic image. Photography and the pigment of painting thus come together to create neither a photograph, nor a painting, nor even a contracted combination of the two, but to “make image” and to come closer to the idea of the picture. Each photo painting by Alfons Alt is the willed potential of an “image picture” that seeks to assert itself as such.
When it is pointed out to him rightly that his photos are mounted on canvas and stretched over a frame, he protests at the suggestion that this might signify an intention to produce a painting. “No,” he says, “it is a choice that responds to practical problems: presented this way it is lighter and less fragile than a framed piece under glass.” That is what is said, but what is seen is something else. Alfons Alt’s photographs are meant to be placed on walls, which is the place for paintings, whether small or large. Photography, through its technique of reproduction from the outset, placed itself on the intimate side, long inserted into albums or portfolios, away from view. The painting, on the other hand, displays itself generously in dedicated and emblematic places: churches, castles, museums.
As we see in Alt’s work, the themes borrowed from painting, the pigment applied with a brush, the canvas on stretcher, the large format, the exhibition wall, all contribute to the idea that the artist’s purpose lies in showing a photo painting as the equivalent of the classic, generic painting. The Altotype detaches itself from the reference to a technique, to become the resolution of an aporetic creation. […]

- Excerpt from the text by Bernard Muntaner, The “Altotype” as a reduction of an aporia or, the resolution of an impasse, January 2016