In this contribution the work of Belgian artist Pierre Alechinsky is analysed from an interdisciplinary perspective. First, within the perspective of art history, the author traces the trajectory of the artist starting from his encounters with the Cobra movement, the Chinese artist Walasse Ting and the Japanese calligraphers, to the use of acrylic during the elaboration of a painted handwriting that characterises his work and that is partially determined by childhood experiences. Then, the author delves deeper into this work by elaborating a psychoanalytic hypothesis. Starting from the insistence of the signifier “graph” in the artistic trajectory and in the discourse of the artist, and using the method proposed by Freud in his essay on Leonardo da Vinci and the paradigm of dream interpretation, the hypothesis is formulated that, during the elaboration process of his own painted handwriting, the artist identifies himself with the desire of his mother, who had a passion for graphology. Moreover, it is argued that the left-handed “written” paintings take root in the unconscious of the left-handed Alechinsky.
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Keywords
Addiction
Aggression
Applied psychoanalysis
Architecture
Art
Body
Case study
Child analysis
Collecting
Death
death drive
desire
ethics
Fantasy
Freud
Gaze
Identity
Institution
interpretation
Jacques Lacan
Jouissance
Lacan
Language
Literature
Memory
Narcissism
Object a
Oedipus
Outsider Art
Psychoanalysis
Psychose
Psychosis
Real
Repetition
Repression
Sade
Signifier
Subject
Sublimation
the Gaze
Transference
Trauma
Unconscious
Violence
Writing