Born in Beziers in 1937, Alexandre MINGUET loses the use ofspeech when he was 18 months old following an emotionalshock. That condition which will last until the age of six, willbe a deciding element in the vocation of his life. That difference kept him apart from the children of his age and from theirgames condemning him to a lonely childhood. So, he is led todeveloping his gifts of observation and expressing himselfthrough drafting and careful constructions of glued match- sticks.

Simultaneously, while following secondary school in Paris, where his father settled as a physical therapist, Alexandre MINGUET follows a correspondence course in drafting with an Americanschool. To satisfy his father's wishes, he engages in studies of commerce, law and agronomy. But he will have to give them up in1954 following a serious paralysis his father contracted obliging him to stop all of his activities.

When MINGUET was 17 years old, he was led to launch himself into an active life, which he does with courage and dynamism, like a winner, as such is his character. Pupil of the Conservatoire des Arts et metiers in Paris, he attends courses in commercial law, trade, and market studies. At the age of 22 having fulfilled his military duties he attends the academies in Montparnasse and the Ecole du Louvre. From his meeting with the artists, will be born his first attempts and his first exhibitions.

In that way Alexandre MINGUET's artistic career begins, with a classical period under the rule of his teacher Maryse DUCAIRE.

First period, first experiments, research about the matter, the volume in the studio, and very academic work on nudes.

His second period brings him recognition by the art critic IMBOURG as an expressionist. He stands as such in the Benezit. His painting is then broader, colorful, akin to the "fauve" style. That stage will last ten years during which he evolves little by little towards the naturalist abstract. He receives his public in his various studios, dwellings, and galleries. In the Aisne, Colonfay, Troenes, Tregunc, with his friend GONZALEZ, the two painters worked and traveled together for a few months.

The third period, which can be symbolic in the proper sense of the word, is marked by his will to create a pictographic alphabet. He begins with the idea of capturing from nature some shapes which can be repetitive according to the series of objects to which they are akin. In that way he attempts to build up a thesaurus of conventional symbols, sketched through a simplified movement, the representation of a subject.

His ambition is to be able to build an ideographic code universally legible, in all times, and in any era. So he reaches through the symbolic approach of shades and movement a geometric expression defined by a colored and linear rendering, being as simple and as clear as possible.

His researches lead to an extreme broadening and simplification of the subjects. From then on he brings down a wheat field near the sea under a summer sky to the superimposition of 3 colored patches to recreate the atmosphere. An approach reminiscent of STAEL'S work.

The fifth period is the logical continuation of that evolution.The painter brings down the colors to a set of grays. The subject disappears completely. That is, for the artist an especially dramatic stage; the back against nothingness, faced with that crucial discovery for the maker. "The search for simplification leads to destruction".

MINGUET reaches then a radical turn in his career.Starting from the theory of cause and effects. He studies the possibility to reconstitute the opposite vision. From the unique, initial environment of the gray canvas he must be able to reconstitute every stage from color, to shape, to finish, by the use of the most precise graphism.

It is a return to academics, that analysis conditioned a reflex in the artist who, from now on cannot look at, see, define a subject anymore without passing through all the stages that he has known in his life.

The thinking, which led him to the virgin canvas, puts him in front of new tracks of studies: lyrical, cosmic abstract, between the realism and the imaginary, from the infinitely large to the infinitely small.

To the endless resources of imagination, the artist, considering that his trade is similar to the writer's prefers trying to deal with ease with every instant of daily life.

Then starts an approach always more intense, deeper, of the subject being human or plant.

The painter goes on a quest for anything referring the strategic nodes of the spine, from the bone framework generally, the sense of balance. The muscle attachments, the joints preparing the coordination of the movement. All that melted into the idea to grab on to life and thought is bound to a sensual appetite of the flesh, of the fullness, of volumes in the case of a female model.

He thinks of the tree as a shape, color, mass, sap, essence while loosing any hope to be able to give to such bouquet of genista the suave perfume of honey expressed by the fugitive passing of the insect.

Alexandre MINGUET endeavors a quest for the impossible which would lead him to enter into a perfect symbiosis with nature. He lies in waiting for that interior progress toward the things and their correlation which would let him bring to the art lover the equivalent of Verlaine's poem about vowels. That complementary feeling for which he looks himself to suggest the idea through the shape of things.

Two main lines stand today out of that rich and sincere work, as much by its ambition as by its approach.

The definition of codes by graphism or by color patches aiming at revealing the characteristics of the subject considered, at sorting out the essence of all the techniques. Because for the painter, only the link between mass, color, shape, tracing, can provide an idea on the subject.

The search for the main laws of life through his trade as an artist with his rare means.

In the full bloom of his art Alexandre MINGUET possesses and master, through his love of painting and of life, a deep feeling of participation in the knowledge of nature through humble motives. His work simply bears witness to these qualities.

Betton July the 23rd 1984
Christ. BE JHELIL