The Gremlinologist

The lithe, balding artist nosedives at a canvas spread on the studio floor. His brush uncurls a reptilian ripple of paint that twines and insinuates itself into a snakepit of color. "All I try to do is let out the monsters inside me," he says, "the monsters we all are." Shades of Jackson Pollock? No, it is Belgian-born Artist Pierre Alechinsky speaking, and at 37 he is already a latter-day saint of action painting.

Old Pens. The monsters that uncurl on his floor are puckishly reminiscent of the grimacing gremlins, eerie puppets and masked mobs unleashed by fellow Belgian James Ensor. As his current exhibition at Manhattan's Jewish Museum shows, Alechinsky's beasts seem to wriggle out of the North European imagination, with flickery fingers, eyes bugging like fried eggs, toothy grins waning like quartering moons, all struggling through a welter of abstract interlace. Even when Alechinsky signs one of his lithographs, he cannot resist adding a few devilish flourishes with his pen.

Perpetual motion seems to propel Alechinsky's art. In Brussels, at 17, he began studying typography, etching and book design, before his love of graphics led him to make endless editions of lithographs. Today his Paris studio is paved with lithographic stones. "It's like walking on pop art," he says. He aligned himself briefly with the COBRA group (TIME, Dec. 12), studied engraving in 1952 with Stanley Hayter's famed Paris Atelier 17, and three years later made a film in Tokyo on Japanese calligraphy. Nothing can quench Alechinsky's passion for scrawling, restless lines, and he collects oldfashioned, fat fountain pens to indulge it.

New Sonorities. The freedom of Alechinsky's art keeps it alive in a heyday of pop and op. He prefers truly popular art, such as the papier-mache statues that the Mexicans explode with fireworks. "Popular art differs from pop art," he says, "the way the pleasure of love differs from artificial insemination." The trouble with pop, Alechinsky believes, is that it pays chilly, calculated homage to mass production. Says he: "You might say it's capitalist realism as opposed to awful socialist realism. Too neat and orderly."

As for action painting, he only uses it as a means of liberating his vision. He explains: "I don't think there's any point to endless searches for new techniques, like musicians looking for new sonorities. It is still possible to get touching music from the piano. With oil and brush, you can tell a story. You don't need 40 tons of cement. Give a man a piece of paper and a pencil, and you'll see what he can produce with means so simple and humble." What Alechinsky does is to turn man's half-tormented, half-bemused mind inside out, exorcising, yet joyously expressing, the gremlins that make life imperfect and therefore bearable.

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