ALLOIS
Allois lives and works in Malibu, California. She moved to the U.S. from Europe as a scientist, but later she began to work on her art again and exhibit in California. Allois started creating her paintings using her imagination but things she saw in her dreams. In addition, Allois' art is reflected by her interest in magic fairy tales by Hoffman, philosopher of nature, and theologist Swedenborg. "POST INDUSTRIAL RENAISSANCE " is Allois' best known for the striking and bizarre images of Aliens in her surrealist work. She illustrated a collectible edition of the stories by Edgar Allan Poe and Ray Bradbury "THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER/USHER II," published by Gauntlet Press in 2010.
Allois work deals with dislocation and estrangement, at times employing decidedly cute characters in innocently grotesque or strange situations. Allois’ paintings portray characters that visually embody states of mind, from the mischievous to the manic.
The occult and metaphysical themes recurring in the work call to mind the universally recognizable issue of the unknown origins of the soul, and the pre-linguistic mind. Disproportionate, malformed creatures inhabit barren landscapes, where our attention is refocused on the interrelations between characters. The figures seem alien or fantastical, but at the same time, they are highly relateable. The figures evoke raw emotions in the audience by being vague to the visual senses but obvious to the spirit.
“My work combines untamed energy of the open sea and disturbing familiarity of alien entities. I invite you to fly into my Dream. I want to take you inside, deep inside. And we are taking them outside with us; we are taking it all with us… all the faces, all the mirrors, all the reflections. And when we let it out into the real world, it will feel familiar, but it won’t be.” - Allois
ALLOIS: PERSONAGES by Peter Frank
“Allois paints presences. Her figures manifest conditions, sliding away from personality and into mood. A particular character may present itself as a child or adult, man or beast, but its identity gives way almost immediately to its nuance. Mourners are not just sad; they become sadness. Nudes cavorting with animals are not just modest; they become modesty itself. Personages making their way through a landscape come to embody self-containment, self-absorption. This is real abstraction, dissolution of the seen into the sensed. The humanoids (and animoids) Allois paints exhibit many of the same distortions and contortions that we see in so much current “lowbrow,” or “newbrow,” painting. But instead of employing an illustrator’s insistent descriptive precision, so prevalent in “newbrow,” Allois engages the brush and palette of a modern painter, luminously impressionist, impetuously expressionist, oddly surrealist, providing her characters with soul even as she compromises their visual substance – indeed, by compromising that substance. She renders her figures vaguely, but they are not vague; as ciphers for sensations and sensibilities, they must be fuzzy to the eye in order to be credible to the heart. Do Allois’ characters and creatures tell stories? Of a sort; they are active, always engaged in doing something. But before their efforts harden into events, they evolve into a dream state where purpose fades into symbol. Do they seem like fugitives from a children’s book, or a comic strip? They seem related to such storytelling formats, but resist telling such stories. They are fugitives only from Allois’ own imagination – or from her own dreams. Some seem so primitive, so atavistic, that they ring some far-off bell of familiarity in our minds. Some seem not simply alien but related to the alien caricature that has suffused through our popular culture – the slight bodies, swollen hairless heads, huge slit eyes and pointy chins taking off from the description provided by witnesses to the “autopsies” supposedly performed on spacemen by the U.S. Army at Los Alamos in the late 1940s. These figures, then, are others and at the same time are us. They don’t simply constitute Allois’ cast of characters; they stand in for any of us. The yogic construct of the soul is as a tiny homunculus seated or curled at the base of the heart. This must be the homunculus with whom, in many variations, Alloispopulates her canvases”.
- Peter Frank
Charles's dream
oil painting on canvas.
Each of Allois' paintings has an exclusive story by the artist's imagination. If you would like to read it email us or click here to request.