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Dear Mr Drouin,
yesterday I wrote you a long letter. I want to apologize to you
for my Italian, probably it is written in a bad style, so if
you meet any difficulties to understand what I mean, you can
apply to Mr. Debord, a reliable interpreter of mine, even if
you are.not going to organize the exhibition, it's better for
us to know each other more intimately. So I want to start telling
you that the technique and the aesthetics employed for the Antiworlds
is exactly the one you can find in a long painted canvas bought
in Turin by the Van de Loo Gallery established in München
(Bavaria), that have already planned the exhibition in April.
I sold them two great paintings: "Elsa Maxwell" and
"Mademoiselle Riendetous" painted with the same technique
and expression, plus "Haute couture" and other 14 paintings.
These are works you didn't see in Milan (except "Haute couture")
as they were not exhibited. Painting is atomized, literally disintegrated
- actually bombed not only in word by generating on the bases
some variations in smooth and dark tones, overlapped upon matter
erupting like a mold-green lava, bordered or rather jogged with
a sulfur-yellow color, which has an unstable reaction and continuously
moving like glaciers, veiled in its old wax, chrome-yellow, spotted
and sparkling into fires of starry light - on all the dark bases
one can imagine, by black green, gray brown and all the most
unpredictable tones and contrasts - I'm absolutely sure - the
effects will be certainly agreeable to lots of people; I don't
mean everybody, but lots of people will appreciate them. For
instance a black, mat-graphite spot with shiny marks of ivory
black on it - black contrast, sugar-paper blue on brown bordered
with crimson red etc...
Violence, violence! In the infernal darkness with a sidereal
light of dead stars. Unfortunately you cannot see the Laboratory
in this very moment! It's an old nunnery with halls and cellars
- really worth ghosts!
The colored writing in such environments is very easy. I very
often get into the cellar by night. I'm captured by a great sense
of anguish - I'd rather say of fear - imagine, some years ago
while they were digging, many tens of tombs came to the light.
It was part of the church-yard of the old monastery of St. Bernardine's
Monks, dating back to 1200. In 1700 the Great Hall was the seat
of the Philharmonic Academy; all this is well documented in the
history of Alba.
My friends and Jorn himself want to make the Experimental Living
Museum of it, we have already got a large quantity of staff from
the Cobra up to now. I work here, where each wall covered with
mold and saltpeter is a document of the past centuries and every
night it is ready to give birth to a ghost - the old pits are
frightening and wailing - like the underground passage leading
outside the walls.
Dear Mr. Drouin, I feel played out in such great poetry, believe
me, it's just part of the atmosphere I live in, I'd like everyone
to understand me, disregarding money. I perceive a sweet madness,
the state of grace of a critical ignorance (not Dalì's
critical paranoia), the ignorance of a recent past up the Sumerians
having the present and the future as my own subconscious: In
throw myself into the remote past, into the first rings of human
evolution in the great Era of the splintered stone of the Magdalenians
and the Amignatians who lived in the French soil 300.000 years
ago.
To relieve, to imagine with them the great Ignorance and the
great Poetry that was nothing but their Magic.
Excuse me, Mr. Drouin, I only want to focus on the atmosphere
I live in properly. From my private Museum I've taken some axes
and flints I've dug out in Alba and to keep to such atmosphere
I have tried to cut my bread with those axes, I have lit a cigarette
with their flint exactly as they did (of course not with cigarettes!).
In such barbaric and heaten, but quite innocent rites I keep
snoopers away by spreading garlic and truffles on my bread and
drinking the wine that provides the Champagne whit its base,
the Pinot (we too have got it), you can understand the secret.
You will probably ask me when it will be finished: the long paintings
on the wall are finished (the monsters are sleeping and waiting
for you to call them). Together with my own son I've started
preparing the ceiling and the floor. Technically speaking, they
will be made of resins promptly drying up. After the curtain
of the entrance (like the black nylon you have seen in Milan)
is left the bottom that will be an oil painting, gray with black
tones, as I've already told you, on which "l'uomo incombinato"
(The Uncombined Man) will stand (the same Man was successfully
exhibited in Turin) but I'll only take the idea from the Turin
picture.
I think my work will be finished in 15-20 days and hoping it
will dry up quickly - it's very cold here - we could see it in
Paris by February 10th or 15th
My best friendly wishes
Pinot
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