Pacific Theater (Théâtre pacifique) 1978

Pierre Alechinsky made this print, "Pacific Theater," with lithography, and immediately, it feels like a geography of mark making. The center is this almost oceanic expanse of blue, a wash of texture and colour, like a memory of water. Then, around this central field, little comic boxes of black and white appear, with flashes of red and yellow: diagrams of something, or maybe some kind of language, a visual alphabet? The textures are amazing; the blue is like watercolor, bleeding and pooling in a velvety way, but the comic boxes are sharp, graphic and bold. This contrast between the fluid and the defined makes me think about Cy Twombly, who was always scrawling words and marks on his canvases, as if to map the surface of his own thinking. The circle in the middle, a loose ring of grey, it's like a portal, or maybe a target. I love how Alechinsky lets the materials speak, and how they invite us to look, and look again.