Imaginary landscapes of China and other fancies

"The Rabat Wall" links together ready-made craftsmanship, photography, and pictorial expression.

 

Starting from the hazards originating from a human-made black plastering of a wall with a light background shot by a relative in the inner courtyard of a hotel in Rabat, Morocco, Alexanor has transformed this craftwork into an artwork by selecting and framing some parts of this wall to endow them with a remarkable evocative power.

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The work she has undertaken is not without similarities with the Chinese "dreamstones" that are selected and named by artists affixing their seals on them, a process commented by the French writer Roger Caillois in "L'écriture des pierres“:
"It seems to me that I am discovering why such images are so fascinating for the human mind, and that I understand the subterranean motives pushing tirelessly and unreasonably people to attribute a meaning to every shape devoid of it, to watch out for correspondences and even to create them if they do not exist. I discern here the origin of the invincible attraction for analogies and metaphors, of the permanent and strange urge to identify".

Precisely, and more to the point, Alexanor simultaneously evokes the traditional representations of Chinese landscapes and artworks from Soulages, Hantaï, Hartung, or Pollock.
The closeness between the Chinese tradition and the western lyric abstraction or abstract expressionism movements is not fortuitous.
The ink painting, the dynamic of a stroke guided by a calligraphic practice thousand years old in China and Japan, the spontaneity of the execution materializing the artist's emotional state, have vastly inspired modern and contemporary artists who wanted to break away from a European tradition where the material process of painting was slow, progressive (from the early sketch to the final result), and dissimulated (a layer of varnish masking the painter's strokes).

In "The Rabat Wall" Alexanor has given to the trace of a visible craftsman gesture a rich and contemporary artistic meaning, quoting in an original way both a very old Chinese tradition and a recent western art trend.

By playing the card of the print on canvas, it is also a new relationship between photography and painting that Alexanor has set up.