Régis Dorval

Alain Godon — enchanter……

What an amaz­ing jour­ney, that of Alain Godon! Before he achieved recog­ni­tion some fif­teen years ago to become the artist he is now, this doctor’s son from Arras was a para­chute instruc­tor, pave­ment artist on the streets of Lon­don and Paris, man­ager of a night club and of a trendy clothes bou­tique and a news­pa­per cartoonist.

Whilst doing all this, he also spent a large part of his time draw­ing; a pas­sion handed down by his uncle, an archi­tect and lover of the fine arts and who, mind­ful of his nephew’s gift, gave him a solid aca­d­e­mic edu­ca­tion through­out his child­hood and youth.
My path hav­ing crossed that of this ‘enfant ter­ri­ble’ over the course of many years (he lived in Le Tou­quet where I had a gallery), I was greatly sur­prised to see this out­spo­ken trou­ble­maker from Le Touquet’s party scene timidly push open the door of my gallery with a port­fo­lio tucked under his arm. I was quite used to this type of approach as I reg­u­larly received vis­its from artists want­ing to exhibit their work. In prac­ti­cally every case I declined to take them on – my spe­cial­ity is the abstract artists of the 1950s.
But this… this was com­pletely dif­fer­ent. What a sur­prise to be pre­sented with so much fresh­ness and vital­ity. The orig­i­nal­ity and the mas­tery of his paint­ings were daz­zling. The har­mony of his colours, some­times very bold, was nonethe­less always spot-​on and his com­po­si­tions radi­ated a sense of jubi­la­tion, albeit some­times some­what dis­cor­dant.
For me, a painter was born; I offered him an exhi­bi­tion there and then and prayed that he wouldn’t change. Since then his work has evolved and the fresh­ness is still there: one of the keys, I believe, to his suc­cess and I hope that he con­tin­ues to enchant us for a very long time to come.