Our painting is an excellent example of the work of Belgian contemporary artist Pierre Alechinsky. After studying at the École nationale supérieure d’Architecture et des Arts décoratifs de La Cambre in Brussels, he joined the COBRA group in 1949. His contribution to the group is a painting style (referred to as “intelligent cardiogram”) that is faithful to the movement of a writing and painting hand, a process perceptible in our painting.

In the 1950s, Alechinsky settled in Paris and, following a stay in Japan in 1955, he discovered Japanese calligraphy and the fluidity of acrylic paint. In his work Central Park (1965), he uses Remarques marginales (marginal notes) that frame the painting, as can be seen here. In The Great Rift a dialogue is established between the centre (the density of a void) and the margins of the canvas. As in a comic strip, a coloured central part is surrounded by small explanatory images brought to life by a profusion of fantasy figures such as grotesque characters, animals, little monsters and skulls. Drawn in ink, they are a kind of annotation made on an unusual medium: aerial navigation charts of the Balkans and the Aegean Sea with drops of ink added to stimulate the imagination.

Our painting is part of a series done on large maps that was presented at Galerie Maeght in Paris in an exhibition entitled “Inks on Navigation Charts and Painting of the Year” in 1981. He first used this innovative process in 1948 in his work The Walk, a piece of paper cut out from a 17th-century map (Pierre Alechinsky, Egochrono à petite vitesse in: Alechinsky de A à Y, published in honour of an exhibition held at Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique in Brussels from 23 November 2007 to 30 March 2008, p. 18).

In these works, he creates a play of intertwining lines and shapes that appear and disappear in a dynamic composition resulting from the imaginative movement of his hand. More specifically, his work from 1981 features maps in the background that seem to disappear. They are either sometimes completely erased by multiple brush strokes forming ambiguous and ghostly interlaced figures that seem to rise from the depths of a dream, or Alechinsky does the contrary by highlighting the outlines of the chart.