Evelyne Axell

The late 1960s saw the emergence of societal upheavals – of which May 1968 would become the symbol – that rejected the bourgeois order of a conservative society. Alongside these changes, a women’s liberation movement emerged, eager to free itself from the restrictive shackles of pervasive male domination. In the art world, shaken by Pop culture, female artists began to claim their rightful place. In Belgium, Evelyne Axell was a leading figure among these female artists in the Pop Art movement before an accidental death at the age of 37, in September 1972, brought her career to an abrupt end.  Having worked as a model, actress and television presenter, she found fulfilment in her career as a painter and went on to create a body of work that was free and assertive. The great critic Pierre Restany wrote in 1969, regarding one of her exhibitions: "The Belgian Evelyne Axell joins the artistic cohort of female power: the Frenchwoman Niki de Saint-Phalle, the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama (...) These women are living out their sexual revolution as true women. They draw the direct and natural consequences: the initiative shifts sides.” Pierre Restany in a text for the 1969 exhibition at Templon in Paris. *Erotomobile* (1967) is, in this respect, an emblematic work of her oeuvre, in which various themes and techniques intertwine. Firstly, the reappropriation of the female body is a recurring theme among female artists of that era. Axell is her own model, yet she steps out of the role of muse to assume that of creator. The affirmation of nudity goes hand in hand with the assertion of free disposal of one’s own body. She photographs herself and then transfers her silhouette onto cardboard. This is placed on a canvas whilst she sprays paint around the silhouette to create a negative nude. These silhouettes, seeming to float in a sea of vivid monochrome colour, are reminiscent of the expressive simplification found in Matisse’s Danse. Here, too, the theme of the female double emerges. The artist often uses mirrored silhouettes, but according to Jean Antoine, her husband: “For Axell, it is a matter of depicting a kind of feminine ideal, a dreamt-of double rather than an egalitarian relationship. The extreme symmetry so often evident in the poses of her figures confirms this hypothesis” (Isabelle de Longrée in the Evelyne Axell catalogue, 2019) Finally, Erotomobile alludes to the theme of the car, a symbol of virility that features heavily in Pop Art. She subverts this by painting a tyre pink and placing it around the two faces at the centre of the painting. The tyre, an industrial and mechanically produced object, becomes a sort of precious frame for a probable kiss, a celebration of homoerotic relationships. This third dimension created by the tyre and its reinterpretation also bears witness to the influence of the Surrealists and their collage technique on Axell, who went on to take painting lessons with Magritte. Whilst the use of a canvas on a stretcher frame still draws on the classical tradition of painting, she does not place a frame around the painting, which thus becomes an expandable space. The figures seem to step off the canvas, as evidenced by their severed feet. A hedonistic work with a provocative title, an immediate visual impact and a distinct sense of humour, *Erotomobile* reflects both the aesthetic of an era and the artist’s own identity. 

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