Photo source: https://www.la-seyne.fr/alain-boggero-au-pantheon/ All Rights Reserved
A former worker at the La Seyne-sur-Mer shipyards, Alain Boggero now paints the faces of his comrades, so that their memory will not fade.
Alain Boggero was born on August 6, 1950, in La Seyne-sur-Mer, on the Mediterranean coast. His parents, from modest origins, left Northern Italy in 1921 in the hope of finding work. His father became a shipwright, his mother a cleaning lady. Money soon ran short, and he preferred books and drawing to football pitches. A very good student but highly emotional, he failed his baccalaureate. Three years of doing nothing followed.
Then, in 1971, he joined his town's shipyards out of "class solidarity," he confides. He was driven by a strong loyalty to his own and an inability to extricate himself from his background. At the time, getting hired was no difficult feat. "They would have hired a bunch of idiots back then!" he recalls. All you had to do was show up.
He joined a union and became a shop steward. Inspired by the spirit of May 1968, he initially thought he could train the workers in revolution. His own union quickly brought him back to reality. "You're not here to change society, you're here to get benefits." Becoming a shipwright, he welded steel sheets, block after block, until 1985.
Working conditions were harsh and accidents were frequent. A piece of a crane narrowly missed a face without touching it, but severed ten toes. Two workers were crushed by a ship block, two hundred meters from his own post. And then there was the asbestos, inhaled unknowingly for years. "I saw about thirty guys I knew die," he recounts. "I touched the misery of humanity with my own hands."
"The Torch-Wielder"
Undated, acrylic and mixed media on flyer, 21 x 15 cm / photo: JJGermain / All Rights Reserved
He had little interest in welding. He never quite became one of them. "I never managed to become one of them, that's what caused me the most trouble," he admits. What he liked was secretly photographing his comrades, which was forbidden on the shipyard, sketching them, writing letters for the oldest who couldn't read. "I was there as a chronicler," he says, "to see and bear witness to what the guys went through, to their suffering. For me, my thing has always been painting, drawing. That's my life."
Fonds Boggero, undated photo / photo: Alain Boggero / All Rights Reserved
Then came the closure. The shipyards closed abruptly in 1985, and Boggero found himself in the first batch of laid-off workers. He never came to terms with the way it all ended. Where hammer blows and the lives of thousands of workers once echoed, a casino now stands.
Faced with this void, he chose to retrain at the Beaux-Arts in Toulon. He arrived with about forty paintings already in hand and a firm conviction. He would paint the workers. Where the shipyard administration saw only numbers in them (his was 6285G), Boggero gave them a face. "With my painting," he says, "I want to show that the workers are men of flesh and blood, not just registration numbers."
A "subverted" photo of a calendar on which fifty-seven portraits are painted, "fifty-seven stories or slices of life": on one side, the faces of the comrades are represented, and on the other, Boggero "tells" them in a few paragraphs of anecdotes or testimonies.
He paints Émile, his face burned by a torch accident, whose mother dies of a heart attack while opening his layoff letter. Loulou, his colossal and cracked hands, yellowed by nicotine. Che, the general secretary of the CGT with his abundant hair, later taken by an asbestos-related illness. The American, a former circus contortionist who became the shipyard mascot, ready to play the fool for a pack of cigarettes.
He paints with his heart, viscerally. His rule is absolute. What has to be said must be said all at once, directly. Going back, fussing over it, is already cheating. "In principle, I never retouch my works," he says. "It's take it or leave it." He thinks of Soutine when he says this. "You can clearly see that the guy is suffering." For him, "the painter must be a scout."
His first works were painted on Decaux posters, magazine ads, and plywood scraps given by a carpenter. After settling in Marseille in 1998, he discovered cardboard found on the street, then flyers, to use less paint and keep only what interested him in the shapes and colors already there. He also shapes, in collage, free newspapers and paper napkins swiped from gallery openings, to give relief to his characters. Nothing is bought, everything is salvaged, repurposed. So many faces that compose, cardboard after cardboard, a collective memory that nothing else carries today. He now has eighteen thousand pieces to his credit.
2019, untitled, papier-mâché collage, 50 x 39 / photo: JJGermain / All Rights Reserved
His work has since been exhibited at the Italian Cultural Institute and the Consulate General of Italy in Marseille, at La Criée, and even in the halls of Paris 1 University Panthéon-Sorbonne. A crowning achievement for someone who thought May 1968 had gotten the better of that very university.
He is not entirely alone in this field. Another painter, in Toulouse, tackles the same subjects. "He is a great painter," Boggero will say, "but the problem is that he doesn't have my background." Eighteen thousand pieces, that is perhaps, deep down, the true substance of his work. "Painting is a cry," he concludes.
Photo: JJGermain / All Rights Reserved
Photo: JJGermain / All Rights Reserved
