Alain Leboucher

Born in 1950 in Paimpol, Brittany, lives and works in Heudreville-sur-Eure, Normandy, France

Luchrones – Cameroon, October 2011

Alain Le Boucher came into the gallery one day. I was sitting quietly at my desk when I looked up to see a gentleman going a bit thin on top under his grey felt hat wearing a bur-gundy-and-white polka-dot bow tie. He very politely introduced himself and took a work out of its wooden box, and then another one.

He went potholing under the desk to find some electric sockets – his sculptures run on electricity, but need no nuclear power station – and, under my skeptical gaze, dashingly plugged in his Luchrones.

We chatted about this and that while his sculptures played and he left a small one with me when he set off to catch his train back home. Whenever he’s in Paris, Alain Le Boucher, who lives in Normandy, is always in between trains. He’s an ingenious do-it-yourself man whom I could picture as an eccentric character from a Boris Vian song, if he didn’t seem to have stepped straight out of an episode of In Search of Lost Time. And not only because of the bow tie.

This little light sculpture, in the form of a sugar tree, remained plugged in, there before my eyes, until its maker’s next visit. I’d just acquired a musical work by Peter Vogel, also composed of electronic components.

Alain Le Boucher is one of those men who put science in the service of art. An algorithm, diodes, electric current, a randomly arranged musical theme… a vision in which music is transposed into light and light replaces sound.

Alain le Boucher sculpts with the materials of his era without being engulfed by the digitized world. The tree’s branches have continued lighting the gallery and I have adopted his luchrones. We really began working together at last year’s Art Paris and I hope that it was just the start of a long collaboration.

Lélia Mordoch