LETTRISM : ALAIN SATIE.COM

Emblems for the paradise society

In 1989 Alain Satié presented his Emblems for the paradise society at the Galerie de Paris ; part of it had already been hung in 1987, the year of their creation, at the Atelier Sainte-Anne in Brussels. He subjects sclerotic heraldry to the evolution of his chiseled art and anticipates the society to come by announcing its colors. He also presented them in March of 2000 at the Georgia Southern University Museum in Statesboro, Georgia, USA.

Through his own heraldic emblems, Alain Satié goes beyond a simple borrowing of the traditional presentation of flags. He supplants and exceeds the codified, exhausted and vulgarized motifs through the letters and the signs that come from Lettrist concepts and the relevant meca-esthetics. The secular past of heraldry is transformed here into para-esthetic supports for authentic artistic creations. The constituents borrowed from the history of heraldry, in part masked by untranslatable elements of Lettrist iconography, lose their initial significance and their code; the repetitive principle on which heraldry is based yields to the creative impulse, in a distinct and in a perpetual rebirth.