Page 59 - Studio International - April 1965

1
John Levee
September II 1964
Galerie de France
2
Henri Michaux
Mescalin Vibrations 1956
Musée d'Art Moderne
3
Victor Brauner
The Wait
Oil on canvas
Galerie Alexandre lolas

the eyes, the hair, which are really outside ... the face
has features. I could not care less, I paint the features
of the "double". I paint also the colours of the
"double" '.
Executed by the hundred since 1948 after the tragic
death of his wife, these unstable effigies are made
from almost nothing, from a little colour, drunk by the
humid paper, dragged in fluidities, blue, yellow, pink of
a subtlety of which one finds the equivalent only in
Klee (who was, for Michaux, a revelation). The crowds
and the mêlée will follow, made of tiny, incisive and
compact people which make one think of a rupestral
art, but constituted mainly as stenography, extra-
ordinarily alert, of an interior fermentation. After 1954-55
and from the great sombre inks, essentially rhythmic,
firstly projected in one single gesture of an enormous
'tache'. Then, more recently, juxtaposed and repeated
in parallel series invading all the visual field or striped
and curved like an ocean in mourning or a fantastic
tweed.
The circuit of the rooms finishes on the mescalin
adventure : an intimate cabinet holds the famous
drawings executed between 1956 and 1960 under the
influence of mescalin, an hallucinatory drug extracted
from a Mexican poison peyotl. The pen rushing on in
bursts on the paper like a seismograph transmits the
terrible emotion generated by the drug : this gives birth
to a tissue nearly visceral where certain people see a
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