Edmund Alleyn: Schémas techno,1966-67

Dear Roger,
I hope life is being good to you and that you’re well.
Yesterday, a voice whispered your name in my ear.
Seeing my father's "technological" works, which resonate like never before in these curious times, made me wonder if you coincidentally, might share my intuition.
If such is the case, it would be my pleasure to show them to you.
Something to think about.
There you go: life goes on.
I look forward to hearing from you.,
Jennifer

Dear Jennifer,
It has been light years since we last met and more years and light since Edmund made these paintings. I don’t know the size of this one, but like several others from this period, it’s interesting.
I remember looking at them through the window of a gallery in Paris, when they were exhibited, I believe, for the first time. (Was it Blvd. St-Germain?) I went back there the next day and would have given a lot to “meet the artist” - When I told this to your father he said to me: “I would have given a lot too, at that time, to meet someone like you who pressed his nose to the window in the evening to see my paintings, and who then returned the next day to see them better”.
That was then. Your intuition surprises me little; this is often how things happen in art.
When you’re an artist, that’s how it is.
Roger

Dear Roger,
Your letter took more than 30 days to reach me.
It got lost in space.
But the wait was worth it.
It was perhaps the window of the Blumenthal-Momatton Gallery which showed these paintings, and which, for whatever reason, remains etched in your memory.
Your flair is right on.

This painting is huge.
It’s 199 x 447 cm.

A loop comes to mind. A full circle.
Where the invisible man of 1967 still dreams today of belonging,  dreams of a space in which to settle. To escape floating.

We wouldn’t survive without art.
J
 

 

See the exhibition on Vimeo