The human being is heavy, terribly so — that is his drama. When one is an artist, a poet, a composer of bliss, it is possible to lighten oneself through the grace of style. Alain Laboile is one of these, whose weightlessness is at once a quest, an ethic and a nostalgia. When the everyday is infernal and asphyxiation gains the lungs, the muscles, the eyes, one must rise, let oneself be drawn upward to breathe better. There is in his work something like a memory of prenatal ecstasy, of before the rupture of birth.