The entrance that Alain Moueix selected as a way of encountering art instantly takes luminous, ritual form with a nascent feeling of joy. Whatever the location, whether fair, gallery, exhibition or workshop, all of our natural perceptive tools are activated by enthusiasm. A notebook and discreet camera are also filled up to serve in their role as collectors of impressions, activators of memories that will ultimately help to create the final work. Arranged in a cool strictness of form and content, the most wonderful encounters emerge from this multitude. It just takes a little sorting. Business visits and various chats feed the ongoing hum of noise, and verbiage, sometimes ragged despite its pageantry, openly rubs shoulders with the purity of erudite passions sustained by the whole lives of gallery owners, collectors, and of course artists. The fact remains that for some people at least, works presented in the soulless cubic segments of fairs, the intimate light of workshops, the uneven labyrinths of galleries of varying proportions and with varying welcomes, or museum corridors have an expression that shines through despite all the forms of triviality. There is no doubt that they have what they need to rise above worldliness and instantly insinuate themselves into the collector’s life: into his thoughts until he is receptive, within his walls until he starts building new ones, into his moods until his life is turned upside down, every single time. Is collecting art about gently creating a complex world of intertwined values? With a playful awareness of being master of just one of the ceremonies that make up life, could it be not so much a fair as a festival, celebrated tirelessly time and again, at its own expense?
