"When this all calms down a bit, I'd really like to sit down together and show you a photo series I did back when I was a kid."
I vividly remember this conversation with Guillaume Alric in the back of a tour bus when playing a summer festival in Scandinavia. Back then, Guillaume and I, along with his cousin and sidekick Jonathan, were in the midst of a frenzy, nearing the end of a three-year tour with The Blaze. The two of them had just expressed their need to take a break from The Blaze - a wild, fast-paced journey of excep tional and explosive artistic and emotional intensity - and focus on their desires and personal projects. Some time later, Guillaume and I ended up in the basement of the Paris-based management agency Savoir Faire, and I found myself facing hundreds of photographs. A testimony to an era, the late Ni neties, but also to a pivotal time of life, when one builds one's emo tional, cultural, romantic and political experiences.
It's a time often filled with pleasure, excess, frustration, and more or less successful projects, but above all, it's a time to lay the foundations for one's art. And at the sight of these photographs, it was obvious that this was the case for Guillaume. And then, there's Clamecy. A small industrial town in Burgundy, not one where you drink Pernand-Vergelesses, but rather one where you get wasted on cheap liquor.
A town that has more in common with the Manchester suburbs than the grand architecture of Beaune. But unlike the working-class districts of Northern England, Clamecy is a city with rich architecture, built against a beautiful natural back drop. Even the old industrial site just outside of town, abandoned for good in the early 80s, hasn't managed to disfigure Clamecy.
Guillaume's work reveals his passion for this place as well as for photography itself, which he studied after high school.
Apart from a dimension of "personal testimony," his work also gives off an es sence of truth, a rather intense sincerity, expressed by the intimacy and rawness of his photos. But for me, the impact of his work lies in these images of a forgotten and often stigmatized generation, one that grew up in small towns like Clamecy, far from big metropolises, trendy neighborhoods and suburbs, where the lyrics of Ideal J and the productions of Lee Perry or Underground Resistance resonated like no other. It didn't take long to link this work to the other desire that moti vated Guillaume at the time, that of working on a personal musical and audiovisual project.The topic, the playing field, the stories, the things to bury or dig up, the influences, the territory and its neces sary limits sometimes...it was all there.
ENFANT SAUVAGE is all that: An album, three videos, a graphic and, of course, photographic universe, a live show to be, which all revolve around this story, these stories. I invite you to discover the result and make your own opinion: My job is simply to create and frame a story. I sincerely hope that the poetry, or rather the many poetries, of this project will touch you somehow. Poetry is, certainly, one of the few remaining things that gives meaning to our work in these troubled times, when we are so deeply stuck "inside ourselves."
Manu Barron, Paris june 25 2021 ENFANT SAUVAGE, the solo project of Guillaume Alric (THE BLAZE)
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