The Vestal Virgins Painting

Alain Campello was born in Belfort in 1951. He began painting in 1973. During this period he also did graphic design and theater sets. In 1981 he met the Japanese video artist Ko Nakajima who opened up to him the world of video and the first computer-generated images. From 1987 he worked as an independent director: commissioned films, documentaries, computer-generated images and cartoons. Numerous awards reward his work. In 2003, he felt the need to return to painting and devote himself completely to it. Today, his life and work are shared between the Paris region and Brittany (southern Finistère)... "...for years I made 25 images per second, today, while we are overwhelmed with images in incessant flow, I feel the deep need to return to work on the unique image, the one that 'we take care of, that we polish, that we charge with meaning and affects, that we finally offer to an attentive, patient, available gaze... from 25 images/second I went to 2 per month! The exercise, then, became active meditation then narration..." With his work as a painter he combines militant action in defense of a pluralist expression of painting in the face of the hegemonism of official art and the tendency towards "single thinking" in contemporary art. In this sense, Alain Campello also chaired the Figuration Critique show for eight years until 2015; he is also head of the “Narrative Evocation” group at the Comparisons fair as part of Art Capital – Grand Palais-Paris and curator of the Base’art 2016 biennial (art patronage fair) in Fréjus. He is also the founder of the Narro group and a member of the Taylor Foundation.