I cannot exactly tell when triangles came to life in my drawings and inspired a pictorial movement that I created towards the end of the sixties that I called “TRIANGULISM”, word born from triangulation.
Is it my fascination for this polygon with three sides, three angles and three support points, adapting itself to all landscapes when they allow furniture or buildings to rest on the irregular soil creating a plan ?
Triangles are present everywhere throughout the human adventure; a piece of pie, in geodesy, in symbolism, with pyramids, the Bermuda triangle, the golden triangle of drugs in Thailand and even in literature when Montesquieu, in “Les Lettres Persanes”, has Rica say to Usbeck in a letter* :

We very well say that if triangles created a God, they would give him three sides.
My dear Usbeck, when I see men crawling on an atom, the Earth, which is just a dot in the Universe, proposing to be models of providence, I can’t give such extravagance with such smallness.

(Rica talks, of course, of these men who created god to their image.)

It is possible that this realization pushed me to represent humans with a triangular aspect, stripped from their natural appearance.
TRIANGULISM came to life around 1967 I believe, an era during which I created my first paintings with this way of expression that consists of creating characters, animals, objects and landscapes using just triangles of various shapes.
The assembly of these polygons, sometimes dented, gives birth to beings whose human traits only appear in majority in the look and smile full of humility.
Even though I have explored all applications of TRIANGULISM, my preference is for the representation of human beings.

Alain Charles Chayer

* letter LIX Paris, the 14th of Saphar’s Moon