TRISTAN
ALEXANDRE

Dislocations is a series of watercolor drawings in which colors teem, overlap, sometimes push each other away, often seek each other out. Each drawing is an exploded territory, a sensitive map of our dreams. Each stain, each hue embodies a singular utopia, a vision of a possible world, a hope belonging to whoever dreams it. On the sheet, these worlds coexist without ever fully merging. They cross, collide, unfold, like our contemporary societies, where each individual carries within them an idea of the future. At first glance, the whole seems dislocated, chaotic, perhaps even impossible to bring together. But when you come closer, when you look carefully, you perceive something else: a silent dialogue between colors, a discreet visual symphony, a common language emerging from the tumult. In Dislocations, fragmentation is not an end but a starting point. And what if utopia were not to be sought in uniformity, but in the harmony of differences? What if our disjointed dreams could, through the prism of art, become a common utopia? These watercolors tell of a dislocated world, perhaps, but one which, from a thousand individual utopias, can build a single, collective one.

Les Poèmes Bleus (The Blue Poems) is a series of 220 ink drawings on paper, in varied formats, exploring imaginary, geometric and poetic worlds. On the blue background stand fantasized cities and architectures, where forms, words and numbers mingle and follow the same score, the same poetry. Blue was chosen because it is the color of dreams and the imagination, and the point here is to imagine how to poeticize the world. Emptiness has an important presence in this series: it is the frugal space that leaves room for the creativity needed to build a utopia. Les Poèmes Bleus ask a simple question: how can we build a better world? Faced with the nonsense of our human constructions, where we try to capture and rationalize everything, poetry is offered as a way out. It reconnects with what makes sense, our emotions, our true happiness, the musicality of the world. Over the course of the 220 drawings, this story metamorphoses. The rules that govern these imaginary worlds shift, the seemingly trivial thoughts of the early drawings take root. Flowers end up growing between the buildings, and from these flowers scattered letters escape: those of the poems written, at the beginning, in the background of the first Poèmes Bleus. The series closes on what it had hidden. If most of the landscapes are urban, it is because for me the ecological problem lies in the way we inhabit the world. That is where we live, that is where the problem is. Reconnecting with our senses and the musicality of the world also means reconnecting with nature: the first seed of a better world. That is why, as the reflection matures, poetic flowers invade the last drawings.

Since September 2023, on white sheets, I have recorded a journey, an intimate and fragmented manifesto. Les Notes pour Sauver le Monde (Notes to Save the World) are the archive of my commitment, a dive into the genesis of my artistic research, but also a broader reflection on my quest to protect the planet. These pages, initially devoted to my schedules, meetings and exhibition logistics, gradually evolved into something deeper: my Notes to Save the World… or at least to try.

On pages marked by the rigor of formulas and theorems, color slips in and transforms scientific language. Artiste/Ingénieur (Artist/Engineer) explores the meeting of two worlds: that of structured reason and that of free creation. On these physics and mathematics course notes from a preparatory class for the engineering grandes écoles, cities emerge, seeming to invade and cover science. But instead of submerging it, art draws on this rigid foundation to bring new landscapes out of it. Here, science does not disappear under the pressure of felt-tips and pens; it becomes the soil of a poetic vision, essential to building a brighter world.

In a ruined universe, bathed in vivid colors, the buildings of LunaŸSolEquis stand like specters of a vanished past. Each drawing tells, through its solitude and starkness, the echo of an extinguished presence. The dilapidated walls, in dazzling hues yet worn by time, recall tales murmured in the hollow of the night, stories of glory and decline, of lives lived and dreams scattered by the wind… Fragments of an erased happy world, where everything, it seems, had been done to halt the inevitable, but probably too late. When exhibited, these drawings, of an almost ascetic sobriety, stand alone on immense walls, challenging the viewer to contemplate the immensity of the void and the melancholy of absence. Each piece thus becomes a window opened onto lost legends, fragments of memory engraved in the ink of silence. Hidden on the back of these images, words and symbols form the scraps of an evanescent mythology, a forgotten language that echoes in the caverns of the heart. LunaŸSolEquis is a journey through shadows and lights, a quest for the vestiges of a world that refuses to go out completely. It is in the space between forms, in the unsaid and the unseen, that the essence of these visual tales lies. For where everything seems lost, a trace always remains, a faint sign of existence, like a distant star that keeps shining in a deserted sky even though it is already extinguished.

Les Fleurs Disloquées (The Dislocated Flowers) explore the fusion of nature and urbanity. Immense plants rise up in place of cities, borrowing their silhouettes and colors. Although incomplete and fragmented, these giant flowers rise above urban structures like a call for reconstruction and regeneration. Each drawing is a reflection on our civilization. Cities, often perceived as hostile to nature, are transformed here into nurturing matrices, capable of supporting a harmonious and sustainable future. Broken but standing, the dislocated flowers embody a latent potential: each fragment becomes a piece of an answer yet to be found.

Project in progress — more news soon.

After working on urban territories and mobility infrastructures, I am turning my artistic research to Space, understood as a contemporary narrative that structures our societies. But rather than looking up at the sky, I am interested in what remains on the ground: the terrestrial infrastructures that give access to Space. The project rests on the hypothesis of a multiple spatial footprint: a footprint on collective representations of Space, a physical footprint through space infrastructures on Earth, and an ecological and symbolic footprint on the relationship of human societies to the planet. To this end, the Observatoire de l'Espace, CNES's cultural lab, provides documentary support, in particular plans and maps of space infrastructures. Through drawing, collage and writing, these technical documents become the basis for sensitive cartographies, territories of poetic exploration. The residency is conceived as an open time of experimentation, which seeks less to conclude than to open questions: to bring scientific cartography and the poetry of the world into dialogue. Research residency with the Observatoire de l'Espace of the Centre national d'études spatiales (CNES, the French space agency), from February 2026 to February 2027.

Les Dés du Monde (The Dice of the World) is a sculptural installation designed to become a lasting part of a natural landscape explored on foot. The project is set along a path in Gesves. Like a game whose rules are never entirely written, Les Dés du Monde questions how we inhabit the world, make decisions and organize our environments, while accepting uncertainty and the share of the unpredictable that belongs to the living. The die is considered here as an archetypal form: simple, legible, universal. It evokes at once rule, calculation and probability, but also chance, risk and letting go. Placed on a hiking trail, the installation speaks of our life paths and the haphazard choices that punctuate our existence.

This outdoor mural was painted on the façade of the Fort du Bois school in Lagny-sur-Marne, in the Écoliers neighborhood. The project was part of an educational program spread over two months, with the aim of allowing pupils to reclaim their everyday surroundings and to look at their neighborhood in a positive light. The work was built in several stages. The pupils were first introduced to the principles of mural painting and large-scale work. They then produced sketches inspired by the school buildings and their architecture, took part in preparing the wall and applying the undercoats, then joined in the first phases of painting and composition. This gradual process allowed them to understand the different dimensions of an artistic project, from design to collective realization. The project mobilized and reached more than 500 people, including pupils, families, and teaching and after-school staff. Alongside the mural, an exhibition of my paintings was organized within the school, enriching the process and creating a dialogue between personal work and collective creation. At the end of the project, a period of finishing and harmonization was carried out to unify the contributions and ensure the visual coherence of the whole. The mural is now a lasting visual landmark for the school.

Created during my residency from January to February 2026 at Galerie Caléidoscopes in Calais, this mural belongs to the Ligne M series, but shifts its center of gravity. Here, the network no longer maps only the city: it maps my own trajectory. For two months, I lived in Calais to build this mural. The drawing developed like an intimate plan where each line corresponds to a stage of my artistic journey, each bifurcation to a choice, each station to an encounter or a stopover. Mobility is no longer only urban: it becomes physical, intellectual, sensitive. The Calais coastline held a central place in the reflection. This seashore, a territory of departures, passages and waiting, became the metaphor of the threshold. Where land meets horizon, my own path seemed to find a form of provisional fulfillment. The sea, a moving and untameable line, fed a meditation on the evolution of my thoughts: how they transform, shift and open, like successive tides. Calais is no longer only a represented city: it becomes a pivotal moment, an inner landscape. This piece extends Ligne M's research on mobility as a matrix of transformation. It asserts that our artistic journeys are also expanding networks, living cartographies, where the outside world and intimate evolution never cease to dialogue. To inhabit a place is also to let oneself be transformed by it. In Calais, by the sea, I drew as much a city as a state of passage.

In the inhabited silence of a former chapel, Les Cylindrons emerged like a city at night: fragile, luminous and meditative. Made of paper rolled into columns, this ephemeral installation erects a poetic city, at once organic and dreamlike, a tribute to the dreams of creators. Each cylinder, lit from within like a flickering candle, holds fragments of thought: watercolor drawings, research pages, recycled papers, annotated, stained, alive. They are the remains and the roots of a creative process, the sediment of a mind in search of beauty and meaning. In resonance with the sacred place, the light caresses the papers like a silent prayer. It illuminates the invisible: the fragility of our inspirations, the tenderness of our nocturnal quests. Around the installation, writing workshops invited visitors to inscribe their own words into this cartography of dreams. Poem recitations punctuated the biennale like so many shared breaths. Les Cylindrons thus became a space of poetic communion, where imaginations meet, and where everyone's inner light illuminates a collective possibility.

As part of my residency at CSE Michelin, I developed “Les Mondes Mobiles” (Mobile Worlds), drawings questioning our relationship to place and mobility. This triptych drew on the industrial history of the site and the surrounding landscapes to sketch a future where humans, nature and technology coexist in harmony. Through a composition combining drawing, painting and collage, the work explored three dimensions: the urban, with reinvented cartographies, imaginary architectures and changing networks; the plant world, with organic forms inspired by volcanic landscapes, metaphors of resilience; and mobility, with motifs borrowed from roads and industrial flows, echoing the way places move and change. This residency, carried out in partnership with the Centre d'Action Sociale et Économique (CSE) of Michelin, was an ideal opportunity to question a landscape deeply rooted in tire mobility. In a context where modes of travel must be reinvented to move towards a necessary decarbonization, this place proved to be a relevant setting for questioning our relationship to the environment and to the urban world of the future. Les Mondes Mobiles was built with the members of the CSE Michelin: more than 600 unique participants were counted. During participatory workshops, participants were invited to contribute by adding drawings, words and symbols reflecting their own vision of a world in motion. By blending these plural voices, the drawing became the reflection of a living landscape, in perpetual transformation.

In a reconstructed student living room, all of Paris spreads out. Every centimeter of surface is covered with maps of the Île-de-France Mobilités network; the same plans we consult without a second thought. But here, these maps become territories of the heart, canvases for intimate stories. Quand on n'a que l'amour… (When All We Have Is Love…) is a participatory installation that turns an ordinary place into a cartography of love. Each visitor is invited to trace, on these covered walls, the imprint of their romantic adventures: a sincere or fleeting love, a clumsy first time, a gentle night, a forced breakup, an unconfessed betrayal. By the end of summer 2025, more than a hundred different testimonies already covered the walls: small drawings, abandoned letters and diary excerpts join the stories and form a collective memory... They become an act of sensitive resistance. People come to speak of love, love lived, love lost, love dreamed. Love still. Because deep down, what is left to us to re-enchant our cities, if not love? It is love that lights our aimless journeys, that justifies the detours. Love gives meaning to our urban wanderings in a city sometimes too gray for our dreams. Here we give voice again to French love songs, to those tender and disillusioned refrains that lulled our hopes. We revive the promise of a world warmed by emotion. “Quand on n'a que l'amour” (“When all we have is love”), sang Jacques Brel and, in this apartment, it still resonates. Here, Paris becomes the theater of our attachments. It is no longer only a city to cross, but a city to love. We inscribe letters, diary entries, drawings of nothing that say everything. We leave a piece of ourselves in the hope that others will recognize themselves in it. We weave a collective story where love is the raw material, the common thread, the fragile yet tenacious weft of our lives. In this installation, love is not a theme: it is a force, it is the only reason we live. A gentle but radical force. The one that allows meaning to emerge from the everyday. The one that, in the hollow of urban wanderings, lights up a trajectory. Love as a way of inhabiting the world. Love as an attempt at shared poetry. Love as the only recourse… Because deep down… all we have is love.