Tel-Aviv is just a hundred years old. This city full of passion and creativity is busy with a never-ending bustle. The swarming and thrilling Tel-Aviv surfs on the mugginess of Mediterranean languidness.  It imposes the picture of its skyline, wall of skyscrapers hemmed with foam, sentinel resting between the Orient and the Occident. And yet, there is another Tel-Aviv. Overcome by the sun, nestled in the shade, the secret and quiet Tel-Aviv hides the depth of its enigmas and the eternity of its questions. This is Alec’s Tel-Aviv.
In his paintings, the city lines up its empty streets and its closed façades. A car goes here, the figure of a few passers-by stands out there. Shadows stress the harshness of light. Under its intensity, the blue of the sky turns white. Sometimes, overrun with the dust of Hamsin, the wind of the desert, it turns yellow. The perspectives recede, intersect: distant base line, cut of a cross road. A “one-way street” sign forces the eyes to turn away towards a grey street corner or an intensely blue patch of sea. The ochre and yellow improve the paleness of concrete. Sometimes, an incongruous blue, a violent or purplish red comes up. They force us to have a better look, to try to penetrate the mystery of closed louvred shutters, of shops hidden behind their pulled down shutters.  Or it’s a bright green palm tree standing on the top of a staircase, a car with a garish and overheated body, or still another car hooded in a ghostly cover. One of them is lemon yellow – veiled reference to another set of Alec’s paintings? It is also the surprise of a red horse whose carriage is parked in the shadow of a street. The houses, which cannot be found elsewhere than in Tel-Aviv, are captured frontally or lend themselves to a glance that moves in a long tracking shot. They offer the straightness of their vertical lines, the roundness of their horizontal lines or the simplicity of their cubic shapes. Their façades dotted with dark windows open on interiors, which will keep their secrets. We won’t learn anything more from the mysterious tear of black and white pictures, which pierce the colours of the painting. Or from these mysterious checked fabrics which wrap the sight, veil and unveil it, hide it partially with their folds as if to leave time to enjoy their secrets.
Then, there are these twisted trees, from elsewhere, which pierce the wounded asphalt. Alec ties them in huge, twisted knots impossible to untangle. Wild shapes show through the ochre-brown of the wood, in its prominent veins, its purulent hollows. They ooze vitality close to putrefaction. These trees put down their roots in the spring of Tel-Aviv’s hill. Their extraordinary baroque is part of the rectilinear structure of Bauhaus houses and buildings, and contrasts its twisted lines with their clean lines. They are other haunted, hidden sentinels of a city burnt by the sun.
Alec’s Tel-Aviv is full of enigmas. The enigma of his childhood at the corner of the street Mapu, shapes and colours that he painted by the tender age of ten. The enigma of his family home soon cluttered up with paintings and their wrapping papers. The enigma of the newsstand run for a long time by his mother. Are these at the origin of the papers blackened like old pictures which come into his paintings, of the checked fabrics which mingle their folds in a coarse weft? Then, there is the enigma of these empty streets, these twisted trees which could have grown in a thick jungle and that he was able to capture.
Child of Tel-Aviv, Alec is also a “pedestrian” of Paris where he has been living for years now. Sparrow of the city with a piercing and keen look, he often roams its streets. And yet, in the grayish light of long winter days, he doesn’t paint Paris but Tel-Aviv and its light, its mysterious emptiness.
His Tel-Aviv, which he recreates for us in its inimitable execution and shares with us.
Pierre Weibel.

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