Projet pour "La Cible" et "Le joli Mois de Mai"

Belgian artist Evelyne Axell was working as an actress in 1964 when René Magritte’s teaching initiated her in painting and Surrealism. At a time of great social upheavals, consumerism, and colour television, Axell created a completely feminine and explicitly erotic universe that transcended the established iconography of Pop Art and reappropriated the feminist discourse of the sexual revolution. She explored three-dimensionality by making Plexiglas reliefs that she brightly coloured with industrial paint. The dreamlike quality of her Opalines envelops female figures in an ultra-modern aura.

The project for the target and the beautiful Month of May consists of two preparatory drawings from 1970, whose figures reappear in the Plexiglas pieces from that same year (the beautiful month of May and the Target). In these works, Axell explored variations of the same silhouette on the front and back sides of the paper: two naked women next to one another who share the same psychedelic hair and strong shadows outlining their shapes. The only distinction between them lies in the eyeglasses that the foreground figure is wearing. Their seated posture and relaxed shoulders evoke both the student sit-ins and the hippie gatherings of the 1960s. These two women – Axell and her double? – convey a serene homoeroticism, and their nudity is an expression of an utter freedom of being and desire that eludes the objectifying male gaze. Scorned by the censors of her time, Axell's work is the perfect illustration of a feminist slogan from that time: “the private is political”.

The work was first presented by the Pinault Collection in the exhibition « Forever Sixties » at the Couvent des Jacobins in Rennes (2023).