Any attempt to begin with Michaux is bound to failure. He is like chance: every thought, every impulse, every confidence disintegrates at the very next moment. ‘I write to go through myself all over. Painting, composing, writing: going through myself. That is the adventure of being alive.’²

Chance and decay are his formula, permeated by an antimatter that seeks to penetrate endlessly into the tiniest capillaries of existence. Michaux succeeded in creating a record of life that neither conforms to any stigma nor follows any logic. Rather, it is an investigation, in both writing and drawing, into the moment when we lose our bearings and stumble, causing our existence, in our self-inflicted reality, to come crashing down.

When I was asked to write an essay for Electra about the writer and painter Henri Michaux, I knew that refusing would be due only to my own fear of failure. Michaux would probably have liked that; he was constantly on the trail of failure.

His own quest dates back to Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, when the city was a nerve centre for poetry and painting. The Belgian-born Michaux (1899-1984) was already a successful writer when he made his first forays into drawing. He created his earliest works on black paper while travelling across Latin America, India and China between 1927 and 1937. His artistic work gained momentum in the 1940s, resulting in an extensive output of works on paper. In the 1950s, he produced his widely acclaimed Mescaline Drawings, followed by the Mouvements series. These biographical milestones and attempts to classify Michaux’s work into specific geometric frameworks are documented at length in numerous publications such as Henri Michaux, Momente.

Far more crucial at this point is to understand what his drawings signify: ‘Books are boring to read. No room to move. We are invited to follow along. The path has been sketched, single and solitary. / A painting is entirely different: it is immediate, complete. At once left, right, in-depth, all we could want. / Not one route, but a thousand routes, with no designated pit stops. Whenever we want it, there it is, new and full. It is all there in an instant. All of it, but none of it is familiar yet.’³ The poet does not see drawing as a finished work. Rather, he is interested in seriality and the under- standing that every movement applied is connected to a never-ending succession of exercises and thoughts that cannot be resolved. Everything linear was repugnant and suspect to him. He wrote that he painted ‘to decondition myself’⁴ — to break with old habits and deconstruct himself again and again.

The selection of works chosen for Electra is part of a larger group of pieces on paper that will be exhibited in three galleries in Munich, Zurich and New York City. The exhibitions at these venues⁵ will exclusively feature previously unpublished works on paper and canvas board.

Thanks to the estate, these rarely seen pieces are now being published in a purposeful, selective way. Immediacy, directness, seriality and transience are all emblematic features of the groups of works shown here. As Michaux’s close friend and comrade-in-arms E.M. Cioran describes him, he was someone who did ‘his best not to reach his goal’. Michaux was not only interested in a given drawing, but also in the support material. A sheet of paper reacts to a water-based pigment. He would sometimes moisten the paper to see how the fibres would react. He saw them almost take on a life of their own, responding to a counterpart. When the paper is moistened, the flow of the watercolour provides a clue to a form he can relate to: it grasps at chance. This approach, which he would call ‘dissolution’, led to groups of works that he created in marathon sessions, sometimes lasting days, until he reached a point of total exhaustion. At such moments, his painting hand takes over and a grid of signs emerges, merging endlessly into one another.

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