Exhibited: “Pierre Alechinsky - Le pinceau voyageur”, Bawag Foundation, Vienna, June - September, 1999. Illustrated in the catalogue p. 27 (texts by Marc Sheps and Pierre Alechinsky). Provenance: Collection Michel Sicard, France.

“Alechinsky does not choose between different means of expression, he mixes them, combines them and, disregarding established norms, reinvents them. All the words we know are both true and false at the same time: calligraphy, ideogram, handwriting, sign, symbol, trace, image. We must acquiesce: Alechinsky is an unreasonable painter inasmuch as he reasons differently. He has broken free from all of the boxes to which we have confined him and enjoys a hard-won freedom. He has become unclassifiable, having eradicated categories. His dualistic work lives off the energy of the contradictions of which it is composed. His figures of monsters swing between the grotesque and the contorted and, at the same time, appear to transform into harmonious arabesques. His shimmering harmonies of colour suddenly turn sour. His cross-hatched and skittish lines suddenly become sumptuous. His unconventional narratives are transformed into rebuses for insiders, spontaneous and energetic drawing proves to have been contemplated in great detail – perhaps this duality is manifested in the very body of the artist, who writes with his left hand and paints with his right. Does he walk a fine line between words and imagery? Between the conscious and the unconscious? Between the rational and the irrational? Between the premeditated and the spontaneous? Between lucidity and emotion? Between black-and-white and colour? Between the centre and the periphery? Between the medium and the gesture? This duality is the driving force behind a work which is constantly called into question, which finds itself engaged in a permanent dialogue between its two extremes" (Marc Sheps in the above-mentioned catalogue pp. 7–9).