(born in Brussels in 1927; lives and works in Paris)
Les inondés, 1959, signed; signed, titled and dated IV 59 on the reverse, oil on canvas, 97 x 130 cm, framed

This work is accompanied by a photo-certificate of authenticity signed by the artist.

Provenance:
Galerie Ariel, Paris
Galerie de France, Paris
Galleria Muciaccia, Rome
European Private Collection

Exhibited:
Amsterdam, Kunstkring, Alechinsky, peintures; Reinhoud, sculptures, 31 March - 30 April 1961, exh. cat.
Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, Alechinsky + Reinhoud, 26 May - 26 June 1961, exh. cat. no. 24

The Franco-Belgian artist Pierre Alechinsky became known in the late 1940s and 1950s as the youngest member of the artist group CoBrA. The group of artists around Karel Appel, Asger Jorn or Corneille was active in Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam — hence the group’s name — and celebrated gestural, intuitive abstraction in connection with European Expressionism.

Alechinsky further develops the stylistic idiom of his autonomous pictorial world and expressive figuration on numerous journeys. Again and again he discovers new design elements and unusual supporting materials. Stays in Japan and New York lead him to calligraphy on the one hand and action painting on the other, whereby the picturesque is challenged, contrasted and complemented by the graphic. In addition, from the mid-1960s onwards Alechinsky began to integrate navigational maps, text fragments, invoices or shares into his works. The diversity of the artist’s work testifies to an autonomous visual imagery with expressive figuration, reflecting a fascination with the representations of the unreal, the subconscious and the coincidental. Alechinsky spans an arc between Western European and East Asian culture.

Les inondés from the year 1959 shows a tangled mess on a wide canvas. The flood rolls towards the viewer and draws him into the pictorial space. Dynamism and plasticity are evoked by the impasto brush strokes, the finer black lines and the spontaneous application of paint. Alechinsky works quickly and intuitively, applying different textures to the canvas, even using the brush handle to scratch graphic patterns into the pasty paint. The preference for graphic patterns is evident in the thick colour fields framed by black lines, which gives the painting a very special kind of vitality.

The composition is oriented towards the middle — as would later become customary in the so-called “remarques marginales”. The “Marginal Notes” (1965 onwards) show a central motif painted with acrylic on paper and delimited on all sides by an ink drawing. The completed canvas is later mounted on a frame. In the compositional arrangement of the pictorial elements, Les inondés anticipates the method of marginal annotations, with semicircular strokes directed towards the centre of the picture, which turns home to clusters of black lines on red and white colour fields. The impasto effect is whittled out towards the outside, the colour application turning nearly into a glaze.

"When I paint, I liberate monsters . . . They are the manifestations of all the doubts, searches and groping for meaning and expression which all artists experience . . . One does not choose the content, one submits to it."
Pierre Alechinsky