Alexander-Charles Gyselinckx (born Antwerp, 1949) is a writer, painter and photographer living and working in Antwerp.
Fascinated by time, and the difference time makes to the times, he is enthralled by the observable outward, subtle shifts in the everyday decorum of life and the behaviour of people influenced by trends, fashions, fashionable language and all sorts of contemporary exotic effects – out of which a mutation is distilled that, you may think, ensures the old is gradually being replaced. But according to Gyselinckx exactly the opposite holds true. In 1977 while he happened to be listening to the music of Erik Satie, sublimely performed by Reinbert de Leeuw, he realized that something was on the way back. It was all to do with time arising from time at the time.
Since then it has been a long and arduous quest for a certain existential balance.
In the 70’s and 80’s, when on numerous occasions he repainted well-known impressionist works of art, observers thought he was merely creating reproductions. Nothing was further from the truth – for him it meant an empathy with the era, a conversation with an artist from time gone by, a dialogue with the time, a complete immersion in another dimension through the métier of classic painting and the fleeting, poetic nature of impressionism. In other words, for Gyselinckx it was like time travelling. And that was how he arrived at his own contemporary conceptual imagery, which would be rendered in small, spliced formats and fragments, through which - by means of collages, photographs, drawings and paintings - he referenced today and yesterday as well as the right atmospheric sensation. And yet other parts referred to the place which he draws from, creating his personal iconography.
During these exhibitions in the 80’s and 90’s numerous references were also made to the literary canon of Marcel Proust, in particular his À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time/Remembrance of Things Past), which in those days was far removed from our everyday lives. Today, some 30 years later, it is all-pervading through any given cultural radio or television programme.
In 1995, during a group exhibition in the Brussels International Art Gallery, "L’Homme-qui-rit", named for the Victor Hugo novel and housed on the place des Barricades in Brussels in a house where Victor Hugo spent his time in exile from 1866 to 1871, he exhibited, amongst others, two works in red pencil on dipped paper, each one a homage to Erik Satie:
NATURE MORTE N° 1
2 dessins en forme de pomme
NATURE MORTE N° 2
2 dessins en forme de poire
Time remains a constant in his work, and the way in which he relates to it today is expressed in both the figurative as well as the original conceptual form – through drawing, photography, painting and texts, or any other form of visual art. We are witnessing a gradual simplification of the poetic and pictorial elements in his work, culminating in a complete economy of image and form, but always retaining the two basic elements of Time and Place.
Time was also confronted in the form of a short film, ALLEGORIE (Allegory) by the Peruvian director Elsa Cayo. They met each other in 1992 during a private viewing at an Antwerp art gallery, where she suggested he interpret the leading role of the 17th century painter Philippe de Champaigne, friend of Nicolas Poussin, in her latest production. The story takes place in the future, with a meeting from the past. The film was shot in a chateau in Bourgogne, and dealt with a painting by Nicolas Poussin. It premiered in Montmartre in Paris and was shown in the auditorium in the Louvre on 31 October 1994.
As a heraldist, he is also mentioned in the works of Jean-François Houtart as one of our Belgian Heraldische Tekenaars (designing and drafting coats of arms on assignment for the Heraldisch College – the college of heraldry).
FLORILEGIUM HERALDICAE BELGICAE Brussel 2004
Dictionnaire Des Artistes Héraldistes Belges du xxe Siècle.
On pg.132 Alexander-Charles Gyselinckx né à Anvers en 1949.
Oevre : armoiries familiales pour le Vlaams Heraldisch College.
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Alexandre’s plastic art sweeps us along, with its magical palette composed of elements borrowed from music, poetry and graphic art, into a mystical world where, by grace of a creative spark, events are relived and characters reawakened from the past, from whence unsettling cries emanate.
The various paintings are among the many facets that establish this diaphanous connection, this osmosis between the past, present and future, through which the artist, overhanging the universe of thought and sensibility, leads us sure-footedly into a dream world of lyrical poetry. This miracle is achieved, however, with an economy of technical means – such as sober colours, poetic texts, musical scores and goose feathers – and the artist’s mastery is displayed in his positioning of these disparate elements, often inert in isolation, to generate this mystery upon integration.
He bring us into close contact with the poetry, the sensibility, the search for what is beautiful and the deep aspirations of the eternal human spirit throughout the ages, projecting these into our noisy era and presenting them to us as a message of internal peace and calm in order to reconcile us with harmony.