Wednesday 11th April 2001 Velan will present The French Laughters, a solo exhibition by Thierry ALET (Guadeloupe, 1965). Born in Guadeloupe in 1965, but resident in New York, the artist will exhibit a series of large canvases and some photographic portraits with faces deformed by his intervention, aspects of a research around human face, masks and the grotesque.

Thierry Alet received his graduate training at Martinique's Institut règional d'art visuel. Having acquired a considerable reputation both in France and in the Caribbean, he established a studio in New York during the mid-1990s and his work has since been commissioned and exhibited throughout the world. Starting with a pivotal speech from Steven Spielberg's 1997 slavery drama Amistad, Alet's current installation employs painted canvases, mural, video and mixed media to provoke reflection on America's transformation from a slave-holding society to a society presided over by a president of mixed-race. His boldly characteristic work, typified by tightly ranged rows of handwritten text, highlights issues of socio-cultural import while at the same time re-inscribing the embodied nature of textual communication.