Alan Fertil’s monography Drawings, Sketches and Notes is dedicated entirely to the drawings of the artist, who died prematurely in 2015.

“When viewed for the first time, some of the drawings stand out among the group of little-known works presented in this book dedicated to the drawings of Alan Fertil. What they have in common is the recurring figure of a central void from which an image or its memory emerges and seems to steer a course between Scylla and Charybdis or to be seen through a keyhole. They bear inscriptions that seem to designate their silent magnetism: “The Whole room”, “The Memory Lagoon”.

The locomotive emerging from the virgin forest evoked by André Breton in L’Amour fou as a potential illustration of convulsive beauty, the telescope cutting out the landscape, as much as that of the microscope scrutinizing the infinitely small, are the frames of a same scopic impulse. One also thinks inevitably of the illusionist attractions of the XIXth century as much as of Marcel Duchamp and his famous cryptic work: Étant donnés: 1° la chute d’eau 2° le gaz d’éclairage. Duchamp’s work can be appreciated through two holes in a fence, the ultimate Peeping Tom of 20th century art. »

Louise Grislain, “Memory Lagoon”, in Alan Fertil, Drawings, sketches and notes.