Michel Tyszblat

The work

Ebrar
1974
89 x 116 cm
Polyurethane paint on canvas

Ebrar, from 1974, is part of the series dedicated to the world of technology and motors that Tyszblat painted between 1970 and 1978. He stated, “What interests me is technique, devices, machines that are so perfect, so polished in appearance and so complex inside.” His world illustrates the mechanization of lifestyles, the “omnipresence and omnipotence” of technology.
He dismantles objects and reshapes them, creating a synthesis inspired by the cold, invasive world of industry and the combustion engine, a symbol or metaphor for the matrix that generates energy. Cylinders, spark plugs, pistons, cables, tubes, and screens float in an unreal space, scattered or connected, forming new mechanical combinations with an elastic appearance that modifies their original silhouette. They acquire a science-fiction feel when in reality they are present and play a fundamental role in our lives.
The shapes are clearly drawn and stand out sharply against the background without overlapping or confusion. The atmosphere created in the work is more akin to a laboratory than a mechanic’s workshop.
The use of polyurethane paint, a technique used to paint cars, or reflective pavements give a sense of an aseptic space. Without human presence, the pieces have a life of their own and seem to be possessed by an autonomous life.

The artist

(Paris, 1936 – 2013)

Michel Tyszblat’s visual language is a constant dialogue between figuration and abstraction. Between improvisation and method, lyricism and asceticism, vivid colors and broken tones, his works contain something dreamy and meditative.
Tyszblat felt close to Narrative Figuration; a friend and companion of artists from that movement, such as Bernard Rancillac, Jacques Monory, and Hervé Télémaque, he soon took a parallel path, preferring to evolve alone.
This personal quest has at least two dimensions that will define his work. Tyszblat did not consider it necessary to abandon abstract painting, as he considered it one of the great breakthroughs of the avant-garde. The biomorphic figures of Joan Miró, the saturated colors of Wassily Kandinsky, or, a few years after this work, the transparencies of Arshile Gorky’s layers of paint define a pictorial approach that demonstrates a keen interest in American Abstract Expressionism and in the painting that had emerged in the United States.
At the same time, Tyszblat distanced himself from the more political and social dimension of Narrative Figuration, at a historical moment in which the effects of May 1968 in Paris, the colonial wars, and social tensions were also very present in the milieu of young artists. It seems as if he saw in Arshyle Gorky a model of the artist who, without entering into confrontation with his friend Breton, from 1947 onward refused to be considered a surrealist, while some prominent abstract expressionists such as Newmann and Pollock considered him the seed of their movement. Tyszblat, who had always given his works almost incomprehensible names that seemed more or less fanciful acronyms, titled a 1973 triptych “Hommage à Arshyle Gorki,” the only reference to an artist in his work. The synthesis between two historically antagonistic models of abstraction, the geometric and the organic, coexist in his painting.
The artist’s work spans almost fifty years, between 1967 and 2013. His biographers divide it into a series of stages they call islands.
After the period devoted to toys and childhood between 1967 and 1970, he immersed himself in a reflection on the presence of technology, a period to which the work we are discussing belongs. From 1970 onward, he evolved toward abstraction until 1980, when a major shift occurred.
The third dimension and the human figure, schematic and stylized, appear for the first time, moving through the streets of Paris in a splendidly colorful but uncomfortable, dense, and obstacle-filled space.
In the 1990s, the so-called portrait series marks a substantial change. The superposition of pictorial layers and the decomposition of figures without abandoning an intense chromaticism show us the way in which the artist delved into an expressionism that he would never abandon.


The last stages, of the grotesques and the zarabads, refer to Tyszblat’s musical dimension. A pianist, composer, and jazz performer since the age of nine—he had performed in public with renowned musicians—Tyszblat introduced jazz, “that magic word that sounds like an electric shock,” into his painting. Titles named after classic bebop pieces, with references to great artists such as Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, and Miles Davis, define Tyszblat’s last great series, which never ceased to resonate.