Central Park

a painting called ''Central Park.'' Dated 1965, it consists of a large central rectangle, high in color, that takes the view northward from a high story on Central Park South and transforms it intosomething that is part map, part unidentified animal. The Mexican poet Octavio Paz wrote a poem about this painting, just a few months ago, in which he tells us how ''Alechinsky draws a magneticrectangle,/a trap of lines, a corral of ink:/inside there is a fallen beast,/two eyes and a twisting rage.'' (This poem, memorably well translated by Eliot Weinberger, is printed in full in the Guggenheimcatalogue.) Prompted by the ritual injunction, ''Don't cross Central Park at night,'' this inner rectangle epitomizes the look of the park at night, when (to quote once more from Paz) ''enclosed in aring of light/the grass beast sleeps with eyes open,/the moon exhumes razors,/the water in the shadows has become green fire.'' The personified park glares up at us, each of its bloodshot pupilsseemingly as big as a football field. Roads criss-cross beneath its huge half-slumbering body, and we realize how much has been cropped from the original image, leaving us face to face, and almost breath tobreath, with a legendary monster. We could conclude, with Octavio Paz, that ''the painting is not a vision, but a spell.''
If it is not an evil spell, it is because of the compartmented drawings(close on 50 of them, according to my count) which surround the inner rectangle of the painting on all four sides and combine to cast out fear. Those drawings keep up a kind of moto perpetuo of wit andfancy - not without an occasional reference to our local mores -that brings down the emotional temperature of the picture. But, at the same time, the fact that all the drawings are in black and white(India ink on paper) serves to isolate the central image and heighten its chromatic impact. Yet we remain confident that the ''corral of ink'' will hold firm and that the legendary monster, terror of...