Manuel Alvess (estate of) Haute surveillance

This first solo exhibition of Manuel Alvess (1939–2009) in France—and outside Portugal—reveals the previously unseen and fascinating work of a little-known artist who produced his entire body of work in Paris, where he lived from 1963 until his death in 2009. For this inaugural presentation, Galerie Jocelyn Wolff has selected a group of paintings that have never been exhibited and had never left the artist’s studio.

The work of the Portuguese artist Manuel Alvess was discovered very late, in 2005. Alvess pursued his practice on the margins of the art world, outside both the market and institutional networks, without being antisocial or cut off from the world. He worked to earn a living, briefly took part in the Parisian effervescence of the 1960s and 1970s, then withdrew, developing a practice at a distance from the art milieu while keeping contemporary creation under close watch—under surveillance. It was thanks to Lourdes Castro, who organised a visit to his Paris apartment by curators João Fernandes and Sandra Guimarães, that the Portuguese artist emerged from anonymity. In 2008, the Serralves Museum conceived an exhibition of Manuel Alvess built around a corpus of works centered on measurement and language, postal works, and performances, situating the artist within the context of a young Parisian and international conceptual avant-garde. The choice of paintings focusing on themes of administration and bureaucracy also pointed in this direction.