Patrick Altes is a UK-based French-Algerian artist with a highly nuanced and sophisticated understanding of the word ‘Tolerance’, the title for his latest solo exhibition currently taking place at Gerald Moore Gallery in South East London. Mostly, he uses the word in the geopolitical context to refer to the types of relationships that can be forged between different peoples, nations and civilisations; and, also, looking at the concept as an ethical value to be cultivated, akin to compassion and empathy or the golden rule to treat others as one would wish to be treated.

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Born in colonised Algeria and having lived in many countries - including South Africa under apartheid – before settling in Britain in 2006, international artist Patrick Altes’s work is deeply informed by his own personal history and the diasporic experiences that have both defined his identity and fuelled his artistic exploration.

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This new exhibition by Patrick Altes, a leading light in the emerging French-Algerian art movement, is something of a ‘cri de coeur’. As the title spells out, each work, be it digital print, painting, sculpture or installation, engenders a plea for understanding in a world beset by seemingly insoluble problems and dissension.  

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An open forum discussion at A Wave of Dreams Arts Lab in Kings Road, St Leonards on 30th October entitled Tolerance, Migration, Identity featured three panellists with truly global experience of migration issues. 

Patrick Altes, a visual artist whose show Tolerance (previewed in HIP Issue 138) adorned the studio walls, was born in Algeria in 1958 but left for France aged four with his parents as pieds noirs refugees at the conclusion of the War of Independence. Brought up in the Paris suburbs, he spent two formative years immediately after school teaching black students in apartheid South Africa, and several in Ecuador before settling in England with a post at the University of Brighton. 

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A Wave of Dreams gallery is making its mark with its programming of innovative artists in St Leonards. HOT’s Lauris Morgan-Griffiths was intrigued when she walked into its latest show, Tolerance by international artist Patrick Altes. The images are seemingly primitive, simple figures, but the work is complex as he digs deep into his personal history. 

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A new exhibition by international artist Patrick Altes explores migration and our sense of collective identity to urge tolerance and respect.

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Major new exhibition Tolerance by international artist Patrick Altes at Gerald Moore Gallery confronts negative cultural stereotypes and advocates for tolerance and respect in times of angst, division and separatism.

A leading light in the emerging Franco-Algerian art movement, Altes’s first-hand experience of unjust, brutal and discriminatory societies fuelled a sense for the politically, socially and humanly acceptable which has become a thematic concern visible in all his creative work. With perilous journeys depositing migrants on European and now, British shores, Altes turns his attention to the harrowing circumstances that increasingly accompany migration and resettlement. 

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France’s former French citizens of Algeria, the Pieds-Noirs, include one of Europe’s largest diaspora communities in the twentieth century. This diverse group of people settled in Algeria during the colonial years, and after one-hundred and thirty years of French colonial rule, Algeria fought for and won its independence in 1962. The seven-year war was traumatic for both the Algerians and the French living in the colony, and nearly one million people crossed the Mediterranean during and after the war to make a new home in France.

Patrick Altes was born in 1957 in Algeria after the war had begun. Altes’ wounds are not physical, and because of his age at the time of independence, he does not have a sense of proprietorship of this country. Instead, his experience of Algeria has been largely through the scope of independence, and he feels no right to mourn his homeland.

Patrick Altes writes for Curating the Contemporary