Pierre Alechinsky

The brush and the scissors Master crow, perched on a tree, Held in his beak a cheese. Master fox, by the smell... Wednesday, June 25, just before the storm (well, that rhymes), commenting on the piles of drawings lined up on a large table in his studio in Bougival: “I took them out of the drawers for Jean Marchetti, who exhibits me regularly, and again in November of next year. Son Salon of Art, do you know? A hair salon that acts as an art gallery. Yes, before being a gallerist, Marchetti is a hairdresser...” A long-standing complicity, which led to this arrangement whose secret I regret betraying: the said Marchetti would indeed be the official hairdresser of the demanding tanuki (Asian canid – the cousin of Master fox), whose Japanese brush of Alechinsky holds its hair both soft, absorbent, and elastic. As he likes. This animal substrate of the tool illuminates the sinuous trajectories, dictated by instinct and opportunities, a congenital indiscipline of behavior, cunning combined with the fear of snares, of confinement. The drawings that the old master and his furtive brush deliver to us here go from 1970 to 2005. We follow the trail of our tanuki, or rather its bundles of hair: on the wrapping paper of a Valcuvia tomme in Lombardy (“This lesson is worth a cheese, no doubt”); on old supports, such as these two invoices from the “good house” Houbigant-Chardin in Paris (from Chardin precisely, the hospitable hairdresser would perpetuate the art of the part...) or on a blotter. Here gives birth to a gaze (Les Yeux greens, 1992), there to a plum tree in bloom worthy of Hokusai (As is, 1995). What a draftsman, I tell you! So push the door of the good house, Le Salon of Art in Saint-Gilles, and you will live this experience, upon my word, singular and somewhat paradoxical, where Marchetti cuts hair... ... and Alechinsky un-cuts (blows your mind). Dominique Radrizzani