TEL AVIV.- Tel Aviv Museum of Art presents Pierre Alechinsky's 'The test of the Title'. Pierre Alechinsky (b. 1927, Brussels), an interdisciplinary artist who has worked in painting, drawing, print, writing, and filmmaking, studied book illustration and typography at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture et des Arts Décoratifs in Brussels (1944-46). In 1949 he joined the CoBrA ( COpenhagen , BRussels , Amsterdam ) group (1948-1951) which formed a year earlier in Paris as an alternative to the declining Surrealistic tendency in contemporary painting. The group members believed that the pursuit of pure psychic automatism in the spirit of Surrealism swept its followers to over-concentration on matter, against which the CoBrA artists introduced a commitment to spontaneity and experimentation. This reformist inclination was conveyed by the title of the movement's manifesto: "La cause était entendue" (The Case was Settled), an ironic reference to the title of the manifesto published by the adherents of Surrealism in 1947, "La cause est entendue" (The Case is Settled). The allusion game in the title indicates the CoBrA artists' affinity to the written word.
The movement's guiding line—encouraging spontaneity through interaction with the controlled and planned—remained uncontested by Alechinsky throughout his life, spawning diverse modes of creation. His interest in Japanese calligraphy (having specialized in the field in Japan in 1955), as well as his long experimental work in print (dating back to the 1950s, when he studied etching with Stanley William Hayter at Atelier 17, Paris), seem to have stemmed from the challenge of building spontaneity into cohesive, orderly structures. Concurrently, since 1965, writing became anchored as a parallel, complementary creative channel in Alechinsky's oeuvre, as he himself attested: "My right, writing hand, returns what the pleasure of painting with my good, left hand does not say."
Textuality is conspicuously present in Alechinsky's visual work which is always attentive to aspects of language, script, and even storytelling. The six etchings in the series, exhibited in the order set by the artist himself, unfold a sequence which tempts one to define it as a narrative (albeit obscure); a tale in which his familiar images and creatures operate and are being operated. Departing from their frames, they violate an existing order, charging-carried somewhere by an unknown force, settling as objects on display only to disappear again, dispersed in all directions, dissolving. The space is significant in its capacity as the realm of action and the activity sphere of an artist who frequently addresses the means of mediation between the work and the world outside it: the painterly means and materials, such as the delimiting frames, as well as the extra-painterly means, literary ones included, such as the title which he regarded as "an addition, a knot in a psychological handkerchief to make one remember to think of [something]."
In his engagement with the work's frames-boundaries, Alechinsky presents a borderland.
Since 1965 his pieces combine painting and work on paper in a structured layout: a central image (to which the work's title usually alludes), surrounded by what he calls "footnotes." When the key image is painted with acrylic, the "footnotes" are rendered in Indian ink; when the key image is a drawing, the "notes" are painted with acrylic. These "notes" ostensibly protect the work, providing it with a frame, since "such a solitary image, abandoned and therefore vulnerable, demands protection from time to time, or a frame of access […] A picture remains solitary in the struggle against indifference. One must introduce a suitable system of references to attract attention." This principle seems to be present also in the featured series, where the sphere of action is inserted in a soft, printed frame floating within the larger, uniformly contoured frame, the one imprinted on the paper by the printing plate. The borderland is created in-between these two frames. In their juxtaposition with the frames imprinted by the medium, the hovering frames outlined by the artist seem to separate the occurrences from their hold on the paper, inundating them, while the detachment and the invisible context raise quandaries, call for interpretations.
The title of the series presented here, Le Test du Titre (The Test of the Title), likewise introduces questions; for how is the title of a painted image gauged? The appearance of the word "title" in the title of the work is not unusual in Alechinsky's oeuvre. Such was the case in his first book, Titres et pains perdus (Lost Titles and Loaves) from 1965, in the book Le Test du Titre (The Test of the Title) for which the featured series was created, as well as in the 1983 book Le Bureau du titre (The Title Bureau) in which he gathered titles detached from their images "so they might be appreciated in their own right." Alechinsky regards titling as a practice in which painters are even more versed than writers, since every unidentified painting, like a "ventriloquist's dummy" "yields to its title," while imploring the painter: "focus you thought." Hence, where do we locate the yet-obscure title of the six etchings presented here?
On the eve of the series' festive exposition at the Parisian Galerie La Hune, Alechinsky approached 61 artists, literary figures and cinematographers, known as "crack-shot titlers" or "sharpshooters," as he put it, asking them: "Please give first names, quotations, descriptive phrases, retentions, ironies, tirades, tributes, poems and slaps to dumb images." He was surprised to find considerable similarities between some of the proposals although they were conceived by each respondent individually. Unsurprisingly, however, Alechinsky did not append the list of proposals to the series album, thereby leaving the question of title pending, perhaps in order for The Test of the Title to stimulate the viewer to contemplate—for instance, the fact that "images await their captions. Backs to the wall."
