Artist Alan Fertil passed away on August 7. He was 33 years old.
Photo: Aude Pariset via Facebook

French artist Alan Fertil has died in a tragic accident on August 7. He was 33 years old.

Friends of the artist have announced his passing on social media.

Fertil worked collaboratively with fellow French artist Damien Teixidor. They lived and worked in Brussels, Belgium, where they shared a studio and living space. Fertil accidentally fell off the roof of their shared house, where he had installed a sunbed.

“I have to confess words do not come,” Damien told artnet News, in the midst of clearing up the shared house. “I have just lost one of my best friends, my artistic partner, and a brother. This says it all, I think.”

The artist duo have shown in galleries such as -1 in Paris, 40mcube in Rennes, Abilene in Brussels, and in institutional group shows, most recently in the exhibition “COOL / As a State of Mind” at the MAMO Art Center in Marseille.

“Skate and R&B cultures were part of Alan Fertil’s life. They both inhabited the works of art he produced with Damien Teixidor,” the show’s curators, Charlotte Cosson and Emmanuelle Luciani—the last to have worked with the artist—told artnet News in an email. “Together, they developed an aesthetic that highlighted the origins of this mainly Californian way of being. They even skated their own sculptures—not to say they created them in order to do so.”

Installation view of “Arcane Vanilla” by Alan Fertil and Damien Teixidor at 40mcube, Rennes.
Photo: Courtesy Damien Teixidor

The curators explained that a deep consciousness differentiated Alan Fertil from many other artists working in the so-called “low culture” range, regarding the creation of notions of “coolness” and “nowness” and their co-option into the market.

“Raised in various countries, Alan Fertil juggled his many cultures with great ease,” Cosson and Luciani added. “That’s maybe one of the reasons he became so truthful to any language or knowledge … He was always using the most accurate words to depict his thoughts.”

“Thanks to his deep sense of both aesthetic and erudition, Alan Fertil’s oeuvre was subversive, yet the near-invisibility of this subversivity made it even stronger. Alan Fertil’s disappearance is a great loss for his relatives, but also for art history.”

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