According to the request of the artist, the choice of the variation is random.
“When I’ve been invited for this project, in collaboration with Lionel Bovier from MAMCO, I realized that I was working on a Christmas event with my son and that this year’s theme was revolving around Alf—an unlikely alien visitor, fallen on earth, and welcomed by a middle-class US family. I realized there was an iconography around it that was just as unlikely and that could serve as an ideal support for these lithographs.
The decision to make different colors came from a printing tradition: in the 1970s, we opened a printing company with some friends and we produced silkscreen and offset prints. We had a lot of broadcast activity. We produced the prints ourselves, and as we were impatient, as soon as we made an edition, we liked to make variants of it right away. Instead of making 100 similar prints, we printed different copies, so that we could change the colors, invert the sheets, make overlays. All these ideas and sensations came back to me, at the printing house IDEM, working with the team who was also very sensitive to the idea. So, we have taken this pattern: from a matrix, I made variants, overlays, color transfers and it is interesting because it is disorganized compared to this fix traditional printing system. We had fun printing these lithographs thwarting the game of traditional printing. After each draw, we sought to do it differently, so it is also a kind of performance. ” John Armleder
