Le Test du titre, a series of etchings from 1966 will be subjected to interpretation by about sixty “elite headline writers” - Hugo Claus, Julio Cortázar, Eugène Ionesco, Asger Jorn, Wifredo Lam, Roy Lichtenstein, René Magritte, Matta, Maurice Nadeau, François Nourissier, Jean Paulhan, Jacques Putman, Reinhoud, Louis Scutenaire, Philippe Soupault, Philippe Sollers, François Truffaut...) and will be the subject of a game for the public.

The Title Test, V, 1966, etch on Rives paper 50 x 65 cm, P.A.’s archives © ADAGP

 

The series of etchings, Bites 1962 (made using the lavender oil process) and the 1968 series of drawings, Source of Information, represent the culmination of observation and studies “from models” of orange peel (Orange Peel), seeds, roots, shells and pebbles; a graphic vocabulary, nourished by reality, that traverses almost his entire oeuvre.

The exhibition will bring early paintings to light, which have not been exhibited since 1947, the year of the first exhibition in Brussels at Lou Cosyn’s gallery. The gouaches and lithographs created at the Marais workshops in Brussels from 1949 to 1951 will reveal Alechinsky’s active participation in the CoBrA movement.

Morning Gymnastics, 1949, gouache on paper, 32.5 x 42 cm, P.A.’s archives © ADAGP

He emphasises, “Cobra was my school”. Compared to Karel Appel, Christian Dotremont and Asger Jorn amongst others, he was one of the youngest participants in the movement. In our epoch when excessive technology risks jeopardising that which is handmade, indeed the human touch, Cobra was in effect a simple, but not simplistic, “database” of which spontaneity was one of the reagents. Alechinsky never stopped developing the spirit of this in his drawings, paintings and writings.

 

The layout of the exhibition will be composed of groups of significant works, like The High Grass 1951 (Coll. Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid), a work that preceded the end of Cobra and Alechinsky’s departure to Paris.

The High Grass, 1951, oil on canvas, 130 x 162 cm, Madrid, Museo Nacional, Centro de Arte Reina Sofia © ADAGP

 

Initially he perfected his engraving technique at Atelier 17, under the guidance of a master: Stanley William Hayter. We will exhibit an engraving from 1952: Something of a World, that signalled his interest in a sort of graphology “above that of handwriting”, which is to say in the handwriting that is within drawing, painting and engraving. During the early 1950s he became the Paris correspondent for the Japanese journal Bokubi (the joy of ink), then in 1955, encouraged by Henri Storck and Luc de Heusch, he left for Japan with Micky, his wife. He exhibited Night, 1952 (Ohara Museum, Kurashiki) and made a film: Japanese Calligraphy – Christian Dotremont would write the commentary with music by André Souris.

 

 

 

In the Porte Saint-Martin district, in a room so tiny he was unable to stand back from his work, he started his first large painting: The Anthill, 1955 (Solomon R. Guggenheim, New York). Then, from 1958 under the protective wing of the Galerie de France, the large format pictures came easily; such as The Great Transparencies, 1959 (reference to André Breton) and Alice Grows Up, 1961 (reference to Lewis Carroll). Passing from abstraction, a moment explored, to a more freely descriptive image that moves from the face to the monster. The connection to James Ensor becomes apparent (Homage to James Ensor 1956), The Parable of the Blind Men 1958, Cloud in Trousers 1957 (SMAK, Ghent): the themes of propagation, swarming and finally that of opening.

 

Alice Grows Up, 1961, oil on canvas, 205 x 245 cm, private collection © ADAGP

From 1961, he took frequent trips to New York where the Chinese painter Wallace Ting, whom he had met in Paris in the fifties, would introduce him to the possibilities of acrylic paint. Alechinsky was 37 in 1965 and it was crucial year: Central Park, the first acrylic painting with a central subject surrounded by “remarks in the margins”. Multiple consequences. The boundaries and borders theme. Indeed, Margin and Center, was the theme of a large one man show at the Guggenheim, New York in 1987. Progressively abandoning oil paint – which he explains in Lettre suit, Gallimard 1992 – for the versatility of his new medium, with which he no longer worked vertically but “in the Chinese style”, upon the floor.

Central Park, 1965, acrylic on paper, maroufled on canvas,
162 x 193 cm, private collection © ADAGP

 

From 65 paper laid down on canvas became the tried and tested support for all the artist’s acrylic paintings. However, whilst looking for beautiful blank sheets of 17th, 18th and 19th century paper he would discover a large quantity of books covered in writings: which led to the inks and watercolours on these pages strewn with “pen strokes, numbers and letters”: school exercise books, letters, out of date invoices, worthless share certificates and geographical maps, military or aerial. A perfect background for the imagination of a “paintbrush explorer”. The brush, for example, that discovered by chance the signature of a Gille de

Binche whose helmet of white feathers becomes a volcanic eruption, an ejaculation or cloud in the form of an exclamation mark. Imagery that results as much from deciphering as from the “black pupil” of the inkpot.

 

During the eighties, the disc, circle and concentric circles – reminiscent of Guillaume Apollinaire’s words astres and désastres [stars and disasters] – would become an obsession during strolls through the streets of New York, Arles, Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire, Brussels or Salzburg… With Indian ink Alechinsky appropriates prints from “pieces of urban furniture”: these metal grates covered with the anonymous imagery of the plate casters, “apertures and grids”, constitute a popular art that we pass by without really taking the time to appreciate its beauty.

 

 

Volcanoes and Terrils: the hill or mound theme for which Alechinsky found a variety of expressions. Through this shape and its mutations, Alechinsky delivers a conception of form that is bound to gesture. During a trip to Tenerife, he united the volcano or rather the flow of molten lava with the emblematic symbol of the serpent. The relationship between form and gesture fused and made each shape the result of a sudden eruption. Through this theme – omnipresent in his work since the sixties – Alechinsky’s oeuvre describes a reality whose central preoccupation is man’s relationship with the world