Marcel Miracle

Born in 1957 in Moramanga, Madagascar.
Lives and works in Lausanne and in the South of Tunisia.

Marcel Miracle was born in the village of Moramanga in Madagascar, base of the mythical continent of Gondwana. He returned there several times, in particular to be initiated into the divinatory practice of sikidy. From these reunions was born his artist's name, an anagram of the one given to him on the island, which means "rainbow". In the 1960s, after his family returned to France, Marcel Miracle experienced the peaceful happiness of a child left free to observe what lives and what has lived in the Franche-Comté countryside: the grasses, insects, birds and stones. He has nature in his skin. Soon, books will give him the words to read it, understand it and install it in him as his muse, object of prose, poetry or drawing. Drawing, writing, the young Marcel sees no other occupation for the passions that have seized him. A geologist by training, he first worked in oil exploration, then became a school teacher in Lausanne. Since the 1990s, Marcel Miracle has developed an important production of drawings and collages, diverting the most minute objects into a dream world where irony vies with anxiety.

Marcel Miracle's work is abundant. For more than thirty years, the artist has been creating small formats, a cosmogony from the heterogeneous objects he finds (broken shells, cuttlefish bones, twigs, rusty capsules, colored rubber, papers and other objects from his daily life or his Saharan travels), but also from the writing of short stories, poems, annotations, and titles to which he pays particular attention. He draws his references from African shamanism, from the works of Arthur Cravan, Perec, Borgès or Malcolm de Chazal. His drawings and collages borrow from Catalan miniatures, Paul Klee and surrealists such as Breton, or Tourski. Marcel Miracle's literary and spiritual knowledge digs beneath the apparent surface of things. Marcel Miracle defines his work as an organization of chaos into cosmos, an alchemy of word and sign.
"Nothing exists that does not owe its existence to the gaze. For the human being the problem is more serious since cultural evolution has taken precedence over biological evolution. The eye here is the eye of the hurricane: we find in these ancient engravings beings of "great presence", all signed, signed with scarifications, mirific hairstyles and deep looks. This look, fascination of the invisible world, is part of an imaginary world inaccessible to the traveler, however gifted he may be. This great turbulence of the glance becomes here only a trace, a temporality frozen in a pose, like a crashed plane, totem in hollow in the jungle ".