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, Madagascar, at the heart of the mythical continent of Gondwana. He returned there several times, particularly to be initiated into the divinatory practice of sikidy. From these reunions, he took his artist name—an anagram of his birth name on the island, which means “rainbow.”
In the 1960s, after his family returned to France, Marcel Miracle experienced the serene happiness of a child free to observe life and history in the countryside of Franche-Comté: the grasses, insects, birds, and stones. Nature became a part of him. Books soon gave him the words to read it, understand it, and enshrine it as his muse, a source for prose, poetry, and drawing. For young Marcel, drawing and writing were the only possible responses to the passions that had seized him.
Trained as a geologist, he initially worked in oil prospecting before becoming a schoolteacher in Lausanne. Since the 1990s, Marcel Miracle has developed a vast body of drawings and collages, transforming even the smallest objects into dreamlike universes where irony mingles with unease.
His work is abundant and diverse. For over thirty years, he has produced small-format creations, constructing a personal cosmogony from the eclectic objects he collects—broken shells, cuttlebones, twigs, rusty bottle caps, colored rubber, papers, and everyday items from his Saharan journeys—as well as from his writings: short stories, poems, annotations, and carefully considered titles. His references span African shamanism, the works of Arthur Cravan, Perec, Borges, and Malcolm de Chazal. His drawings and collages draw inspiration from Catalan miniatures, Paul Klee, and Surrealists such as Breton and Tourski. Marcel Miracle’s literary and spiritual knowledge probes beneath the apparent surface of things. He 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 humans, this problem is more serious, since cultural evolution has overtaken biological evolution. Here, the eye is the eye of the cyclone: in these ancient engravings, one finds beings of ‘great presence,’ all marked, sigiled with scarifications, extravagant hairstyles, and deep gazes. This gaze—fascination with the invisible world—belongs to an imagination inaccessible to even the most skilled traveler. This great turbulence of the gaze becomes here only a trace, a temporality frozen in a pose, like a crashed airplane, a totem hollowed out in the jungle.”
Collections
Collection agnès b., Paris, France
Collection Lambert - musée d'art contemporain, Avignon, France
