Michel Alexis: Absence and Eros in Painting
Robert C. Morgan, 2011

For nearly two decades, I have had the occasion to see paintings by Michel Alexis in several New York exhibitions. My initial impulse was to interpret his paintings as a bridge somewhere between formalism and conceptual art. During the 1990s, the use of language in serious abstract painting implied something beyond the surface, reminiscent of the experiments between the Suprematists and the Russian formalist poets in Moscow Linguistic Circle on the eve of the Revolution. With Alexis, I became interested not only in investigating the semiotics in his work but the mystery that lingered after the signs had been deconstructed. This generic mystery - as the Russian linguist, Roman Jacobson, once explained - is not about ignoring the semiotic structure, but quite the contrary. Before mystery in art has any validity, one must investigate the system of signs within the work. To understand what exists beyond the artist\'s construct will eventually incite the mystery or --more specifically in the work of Alexis -- the absence or void from which his erotic content emerges.

Alexis neither confines his model of painting - in contrast to \'painting as model\'- to precognitive strategies nor does he engage in calculating forms that constitute a semiotic discourse. One might also add that his paintings are not contingent on unconscious or automatist strategies. Rather I would argue, at least on one level, that his paintings are about the words as much as the words are about paintings. Even as language is not exterior to the paintings but intrinsically involved with the process of their making, he refrains from any form of calculated endeavor. The linguistic infrastructure rarely eludes the surface of the work as the artist often vacillates between making both visual signs and signs that seduce us into giving them meaning. Here I defer to the Bloomsbury critic Roger Fry\'s differentiation between drawing as calligraphy and the drawing of contours that imply forms of representation. Because Alexis is somewhere between the two, his method cannot be easily related to the Surrealism. His paintings are mistakenly called \'elegant\' largely because of this misreading. Nor is he seeking a kind of distillation in painting contingent on drawing.

On another level, Alexis\'s paintings are even further removed from the kind of appropriation strategies used by artists who work in relation to popular culture, where the work\'s referential value often fails to go beyond consumerist ideology, whether it is represented as irony or critique. Alexis allows his signs to emerge through an entirely different method, a type of synesthesia that goes beyond the density of language or the necessity of critical theory. The artist made a statement in 2005 that he is involved in the synesthetic aspect of painting. This suggests that his work depends on involuntary associations that pass between his senses. From this, we might infer that Alexis paints within the realm of absence. One might translate this process to mean a kind of formal convolution or trans-sensory phenomenon. Here we might consider the following: Absence emits sensory contact as a means to incite desire. For Alexis, desire and absence are inextricably bound to one another. He calls it \'erotic\'. Therefore, the involuntary associations of his forms, colors, and linear shapes drawn over thin Asian paper mounted on canvas become the fundamental basis of his expression.

Mallarme has been cited in relation to Alexis\'s paintings, as have the ironic musical quirks of Satie or even the poignant symphonic epistles of Debussy. Experimental literature and music sit well with these paintings, given their conceptual ground and distillation of form. Alexis\'s approach to painting becomes possible if we review the previous century in terms of \'history\' that was lost and now regained through appropriation - less in terms of empathy than paradox where the concept of selfhood may largely depend on having removed itself from the former seduction of alienation. Of course, we cannot neglect the enormous influence of Gertrude Stein on Alexis either, specifically her posthumously published Birthday Book from 1924, which became the focus of the artist\'s 1995 exhibition in which the artist revealed a certain kinship between Stein\'s prose and his own approach to words as subject matter for his paintings. Having recently re-read another small book by Stein written ten years earlier, Tender Buttons (1914), I was struck by the syncopation of her language verging on rhythmic cadences comparable to Alexis\'s partial synesthesia where the syncopated transfer of scribbled words returns to drawing and color. The result becomes a kind of painting that exists in suspension without a designated history - without a past, present, or future - yet existing in time or, perhaps, within time, as a kind of meditation. This is the moment the mind\'s eye stammers in a flurry. They are paintings searching for a spatial reprieve, a synoptic authenticity, an aesthetic fusion where experience is less contingent on meaning than a profound absence of meaning. These paintings do not move. They are immobile contractions without pixilation. Their stasis holds within the hub of the Taoist wheel, the spokeless wheel of Non-Being, emanating away from the boundaries of meaning. This signifies a potential darkness, the emptiness prior to rebirth: sunyata (Sanskrit)or\'the pregnancy of the void\'.

A couple of remarks about the current paintings are necessary to further elucidate my understanding of Alexis. There are paintings titled Epigrams in this exhibition, a title indicating a short matter-of-fact poem, often with metaphorical content. Again, the transfer from word to painting is implied.

There are often one or two sections that appear within a loose grid, created from the adhering of the Asian papers, which is the constructive basis of these paintings. Epigram 10, for example, is 60 x 48 inches, painted with oil and a thin resin-based medium overlay. One may detect a half-moon shape in one area, a vaginal form in another, and a Matissean contour weaving down one side. Epigram 38 is painted on a square format with eight paper sections, the contours are loops, both drawn and cut (decoupage), and appear overwhelmingly feminine, suggesting Fragonard more than Titian. Here I feel it is important to know that Alexis is a self-trained artist with a social science background in economics. For eight years he lived in a secluded village in the Alps when he was not traveling to foreign countries outside of Europe. I mention that because - like Morandi - Alexis maintains a certain consistency in his formal approach in spite of his exposure to many cultures.
Therefore, Asian ideograms or Proto-Sinaitic script are not outside of his purview. I am fascinated how these multicultural or transcultural involvements inform two other paintings, titled Sailing from Byzantium and Subtracted Word. (While there are no dates available on these works, I am assuming they were within the past three years, more or less at the time of the Epigrams.) The clarity of line and shape in the Byzantium painting is astonishing, and the animal-shaped contours - like cave drawings - are evident in the second. What I gather from these paintings is a sense of space whereby the linear elements function as a kind of undergarment that does not impose its sense of Eros on the body of the painting. Rather it gently and indirectly gives the surface a distinctly erotic tone, heightening the desire to optically attend to the surface, to move into it, to become part of it.

While contemporary painting (since the postmodernism of the 1980s) has largely assumed distance - even cynical detachment as in new American figuration - Alexis retains something deeper, a quest of the legibility of feeling with the discourse of painting. This is its attraction. To come to terms with the linguistic infrastructure of such paintings implies an ability to glance between work and contour and to attend to the cryptic density of the surface. These paintings are not merely visual - a highly generic term - but they are exceedingly optical in the sense they are not without illusion or the illusion of shifting elements intentionally placed in a manner that disrupts the predictability of composition. Indeed, Alexis has gone through the window of conceptual art - which he understands - and come out on the side of painting. Can we still call what he does abstract? I am not convinced.
Even so, Alexis has retrieved the aura of attentiveness in painting by searching the roots of language through an absence given to Eros.

Robert C. Morgan is an American art historian, critic, abstract painter, and curator. He holds both an M.F.A. in Sculpture and a Ph.D. in Art History and Aesthetics. Since 1992, he has been a New York correspondent for Art Press and is currently a Consulting Editor for The Brooklyn Rail in New York. In 1999, he was awarded the Premiere Arcale award in Salamanca for international art criticism, and in 2011 was inducted into the European Academy of Science and Art in Salzburg.

From Visual Text to Textual Vision
Barry Schwabsky, January 1997

The gesture of writing and that of drawing (more broadly, of making a picture) are remarkably similar in appearance. With good reason, we speak of \'the hand\' as a synecdoche for both. Likewise, we receive the marks produced thereby in a way that seems identical, through the eye. But elsewhere, invisibly, the two process diverge: they transpire, according to neurologists, in different areas of the brain.

Textual and pictorial activity are as inextricably intertwined as they are fundamentally distinct, perhaps even antagonistic. At least since Cubism, painters have taken two fundamental approaches to this dilemma: either to purify painting of all literary resonance (or as much as possible) in order to present a wholly visual phenomenon, or else to display precisely this conflicted enmeshing by bringing the textuality of its materials to the surface of the work (other possibilities seem to lead outside painting altogether: subordination of the pictorial activity to the text becomes illustration; distillation of the text from the picture, working towards a \'purely\' textual art, led in the 1960s to a new genre, conceptual art).

In New York, the fortuitous conjunction of major retrospectives of the work of Ellsworth Kelly and Jasper Johns has made this bifurcation in the path of painting peculiarly vivid of late. Michel Alexis, it is clear enough, has followed the second path, that of Johns rather than Kelly. \'Is it clear enough\', I just asked, and already I feel compelled to retract my words, because in his newest paintings Alexis has deliberately restrained, without in any way eliminating, the textual dimension of his painting. He has rechanneled the relation between textuality and visuality in his work, so that it has shifted its identity, from what might be called a visual text to a textual vision.

Stephane Mallarme wrote of the anxiety provoked by the blank page, with its imperious demand to be filled with writing. For Alexis, we may imagine, as he begins covering the surface of one of his canvases with words extracted from a little-known text by an author more read-about than read, the presence of some already existing writing functions to alleviate a similar anxiety about beginning; paradoxically, it allows him to begin his more self-evidently pictorial part of his painting process, not with a blank canvas, but with a canvas that is neither blank nor yet pictorial. Alexis\'s source is Gertrude Stein\'s Birthday Book, a text written in 1924 and given for publication to Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler with the intention that it be illustrated with Picasso\'s engravings. When the project fell through, the text languished, and it only came to light with the 1957 publication of Volume 7 of the Yale edition of Stein\'s uncollected writings.

Stein\'s text is a murmuring of language not too fraught with the importunings of \'meaning\'. It\'s editor in the Yale edition, Donald Gallup, refers to it as \'a decorative work\', an exercise with words. For Alexis, the text exists mostly to be suppressed as such: what was at first safely not-pictorial, or at least-not-yet pictorial, only gradually, as the painter\'s work continues, develops into a potential threat to the incipiently pictorial, an energizing challenge to the painter\'s ability to synthesize heterogeneous material. It ends either by being subsumed by the painting - in this case writing is reinscribed by the painting as having been always already pictorial (and the choice of the Birthday Book is most appropriate for this, since according to Gallup, - Stein was concerned principally with the appearance of the words on a printed page, which is to say that hers is a visual text more than a conventionally literary one), or else it is simply irretrievably buried somewhere in the mix, perhaps somehow felt as a subliminal textural hum, but no longer seen.

This is a highly oblique way to enter into the process of painting, one might say \'all the more so in that the frottage technique Alexis uses to register Stein\'s text onto his canvases is in itself quite indirect, since it involves stenciling the words in relief onto a hard ground against which the canvas can then be rubbed. The text, in its initial presence on the canvas, has already been placed at more than one remove. Given that almost all the results of this process are destined to disappear, especially in the recent paintings of the Birthday Book series, and in contrast to the Stein\'s Diary paintings of 1994 and 1995 where the text was far more evident, it\'s hard not to think that there is a process of disavowal going on (Ceci n\'est pas une peinture, as Magritte might have said) - an attempt to lose track of the origin through feints that are at the same time repetitions. This blend of repetition and difference has the effect of something like punning, and as a strategy it brings Alexis that much closer to Stein, for whom (to quote the Birthday Book) \'the fourth of January reminds one the fourth of January and so forth, and so fourth and January\'.

The next step is to cover the canvas with an irregularly gridlike ground made of gesso and paper. Already much of the frottaged text is shrouded, but the fact that this surface is so clearly made of collaged sheets - and this will remain quite evident in the finished painting - keeps the notion of writing to the fore. Contrary to Mallarme, the blank page here emerges after writing, in its wake. At last, lines and colors begin to traverse this already densely insinuative domain, this surface which is not that of literature but is thick with the aroma of writing. Alexis\'s graphic line is intoxicated with that lush perfume. It twists and spirals fitfully through this writerly atmosphere like a moth around a flame, sometimes gliding atop the surface but just as often gouging into it to raise scarlike passages - traces of a strangely delicate violence.
For in these paintings it is, above all, line that returns us to the freshness of origins. And given the way the paintings are begun, it should be no surprise that Alexis\'s errant lines do not spread across the expanse of the canvas to involve its entirety in a single web, like those of Brice Marden, but rather coil back in on themselves to affect the self-containment of characters in some unheard-of script. Isn\'t this the cursive line of writing, of handwriting, though here liberated from the discipline of inditing known and recognized letters? This must be what writing looks like to a child who has not yet learned to read, and who therefore sees not what is written, but simply writing. In order to inscribe something written, writing itself has to become transparent, invisible; but in order to perceive writing once more, as we do in these paintings, we must allow ourselves to be taught to stop reading and see.

REVIEW
Day by Day by Stein by Alexis: Michel Alexis at Elga Wimmer
Karen Chambers, February 15, 1997

Michel Alexis\'s new paintings are inspired by Gertrude Stein\'s Birthday Book, a point that is made clear by the written material announcing and supporting the exhibition at Elga Wimmer Gallery through March 1. This is fortunate since looking at the paintings themselves, the specific source is not readily apparent, nor essential to know.

Taken at face value, these are quite beautiful abstract paintings with luscious surfaces so subtle that photographs cannot do them justice.

They are a visual treat first, and Alexis, who has been inspired before by Stein, has picked the perfect Stein text to work from to achieve this effect. Often Stein\'s writing is characterized as a verbal equivalent of abstract painting. Donald Gallup, the Birthday Book\'s editor in the Yale University edition of Stein\'s uncollected writings, calls it \'a decorative work, an exercise with words\'. Alexis\'s paintings are also decorative, or formal if decorative sounds pejorative, exercises within the vocabulary of painting.

At the literal base of Alexis\'s canvases, there is Stein\'s text. Alexis has stenciled it onto a hard surface, and then rubbed the canvas against it to pick up the ghost of the words. Next the canvas is covered with sheets of paper and gesso, further obscuring the frottaged text, but at the same time keeping \'the notion of writing to the fore\', as Barry Schwabsky points out in the catalogue accompanying this exhibition which traveled from the University of Denver to the Elga Wimmer Gallery. In most cases, the text is unreadable, as some critics of Stein\'s writing suggests hers is.

On the surface of this grid, Alexis paints and draws, sometimes ripping and crinkling the paper, adding a texture to the surface, or scarring it as a knife slicing flesh, skin. Alexis\'s line is like automatic writing, looping over the compositional plane and sometimes extending beyond it.

Within the abstraction appear clues to meaning, fragments of a narrative that has been dispensed with as the innovative Stein did. There is an elegantly curvilinear R in FEBRUARY 8, 1996; blue and white stripes that somehow recall wallpaper in NOVEMBER 3, 1996, or perhaps even incised hearts in DECEMBER 17, 1996, but no conventional story is being told.

In these paintings, the Stein references that were more clearly defined in earlier works by Alexis have become subsumed by painterly concerns, echoing Stein\'s writing which was more about form than content. The result is a thought-provoking and visually haunting exhibition.

Michel Alexis
Eleanor Heartney, March 1995

It was said of Erik Satie that he was born very young in a world that was very old. The dreamy delicacy and abstract purity of Satie\'s music haunt the paintings of Michel Alexis, who also suggests a figure at odds with his century. One must go back in time - to the less hurried pace of early twentieth century Paris, to a world of elaborate manners and capricious dÈcor, to the exquisitely refined ennui of esthetes like Satie, Ravel, Debussy, and to the rarefied circle surrounding Gertrude Stein to find the musical and textual analogues to his work.

Raised in a small town in rural France, and trained in music before turning to painting ten years ago, Alexis has refined an art of subtle nuance and barely stated irony. He restricts his palette largely to shades of faded green, gray, brown and blue which bring to mind aged silk. An occasional blast of luminous blue breaks through the veils of muted color like the icy fingers of real experience tearing aside the curtain of memory. Time appears to have left its mark on the heavily gessoed grounds of the paintings in the form of traces of the palette knife and occasional desultory incisions. A sense of distance and mystery is reinforced by the layering of images and the play of forms or text which have been painted in hues of nearly identical values, so that they become all but indistinguishable in ordinary light.

The imagery is equally wistful. In many of the paintings, arabesques float within rectangular forms or curl over fields of barely decipherable texts. Alexis traces this motif back to the ornamented ceilings and decorative friezes which he used to contemplate as a child. The arabesque speaks to him both of a frozen energy and of the monotonous tedium of a proper bourgeois existence. In one work, a pair of Regency chairs sit side by side, their whirling, intricate backs signifying a way of life that has all but disappeared.

Other works contain plaster cupid heads or bits of decorative molding which have similar connotations. In a work entitled ?Cherubini? a rectangle of vivid blue lies over a textured field of dull brown whose cracks and incisions suggest weathered plaster wall. A round piece of ornamental molding lies in the lower half of the blue intrusion while the word \'Cherubini\' in stenciled white letters floats above. Thus the work conjures a generalized memory of Renaissance painting - the heavenly blue, the choirs of angels, the elaborate architectural settings - without actually containing any specific elements.

Another recurring motif is the small outline or photo image of a child in late Victorian dress. While this image obviously points backward in time, it is not an evocation of any genuine memory. Instead, Alexis acknowledges that nostalgia is more a substitute for the past rather than a return to it ? he notes that he himself has no memory of his own childhood prior to age twelve. As a result, the motifs that refer to childhood innocence and purity in his work are archetypal rather than personal, and seem to result more from an effort at invention than at simple recollection.

Recently, Alexis has begun to draw on the writings of Gertrude Stein as an inspiration for his work. Stenciling fragments of text from Stein?s writings onto his canvases in such a way that they can only be read through layers of paint with great difficulty, he gives visual form to Stein?s efforts to create a cubist language by fragmenting the English language and reducing it to a ?continuous present?. Alexis notes that one feature of Stein?s writing is the way that the repetition of a word or phrase eventually drains it of any conventional meaning.

Something similar happens to the texts in his paintings. One series of paintings simply offers a recitation of the days of the moth, taken from Stein?s diary. Written out in words, the dates unroll across the canvas like patterns in a bolt of fabric, suggesting the sameness of the succession of days. In other works, the texts lie underneath the whiplash pattern of arabesques, little more than empty markers of meaning, like the calligraphic marks that Alexis sometimes incises into the thickly gessoed fields of paint.

In one work, the polite phrase \'I am very sorry not to have been able to see you again\', lifted from one of Stein\'s letters, is denuded of meaning in another way. A conventional expression, this phrase ornaments genteel conversation in the same way that the arabesques ornament a parlor or drawing room. In the context of this painting, it operates not as a caption, or explanation - the roles we usually assign to text in a painting - but as another decorative element.

Taken as a whole, Alexis paintings explore the territory of the elliptical and the esoteric. Even the gestures with which paint is laid on canvas seem arrested in time and frozen in space. As in the compositions of Satie and Debussy, two composers with whom Alexis feels a strong kinship, the sturm and drang of romantic expression has been spurned in favor of an exploration of refined sensibility.

To understand Alexis reductive impulse, it is important to locate him in the proper time and place. There is no trace here of the concerns of American-style minimalism with its desire to seek the elemental materialism of painting and sculpture. By contrast, in Alexis work, reduction produces not essence, but a melancholy sense of loss.

One senses that one reason for his fascination with Gerrude Stein is their common status as expatriates. As a European who now travels between France and New York, Alexis feels the pull of the history and the burden of past greatness. Words and images hover on the edge of the void, rendered powerless by the whispers of nearly forgotten meanings at the far end of memory. Alexis evokes a vacancy, but the emptiness is haunted by ghosts.