Pierre Alechinsky 1927 -

Belgian-born painter.

After completing his studies at the École Nationale des Arts Décoratifs, he was inspired by a meeting with Dotremont and the discovery of Cobra. He immediately became one of the most active members of the group and began working with other members 'four-handed', especially with Appel and Dotremont, producing oil paintings filled with a multitude of small figures; his taste for ironical titles and curved lines was already becoming evident. When Cobra was disbanded, he moved to Paris where he studied printmaking and moved in Surrealist circles. He made a film on calligraphy in Japan in 1955, then began progressively to abandon oils in favour of ink and, later, acrylics; he now worked bent over canvas or sheets of paper pinned to the floor. His work contained residual figurative motifs, such as goblins, reptiles of every description, volcanoes, rushing streams. The beasts and geographical elements arouse disquiet as well as smiles of complicity. For twenty years, from 1958, he exhibited regularly at the Galerie de France and the international dimension of his career began to grow. In 1965 he produced his first canvas with marginal annotations (Central Park). The four sides of the image bear a series of vignettes, additional to, and sometimes relevant to, the main theme and introducing numerous parallel texts. Frames like these alternate with predellas, on his engravings as well as his paintings. Alechinsky enjoys working on lawyers' brief papers, maps, paper stained with fingerprints and marks, which he then pastes on to huge canvases: he fears blank surfaces, hastening to transform them, to intertwine the patterns which emerge from his own chance-born curlicues and figures. Alechinsky has been admirably consistent in his tastes (Dotremont, and also Michaux and Bram van Velde), and he dedicates works to those he admires. He enjoys collaborating with his literary friends (Joyce Mansour, Jean Tardieu, Roger Caillois, Michel Butor, etc.), either illustrating their work or inviting them to give titles to his (The Title Test, 1967). His own work (Titles and French Toast, 1967; Freewheel, 1971; The Other Hand, 1988, etc.) demonstrates his biting wit and also an ability to pursue analogies - between objects, between words - equaled only by his capacity for producing new analogies amid the brightly coloured forms.