The traveller : situation report
What do we know about the painter who sought refuge in Greece an entire autumn long, fleeing his wife, his child, and the formal monotony he strove to break away from ? What do we know of his hands, his dreams, his despair ? It seemed that one morning, on a day of rest, he decided to leave without unnecessary luggage — two books at most, some sheets of drawing paper, and a few base colours. The comfort he had settled into no longer satisfied him, almost blinding him with boredom.
We know that he arrived in the cradle of Western civilisation with a fondness for Cycladic art, its simple forms and sparsity of detail. Archaeological digs revealed highly stylised depictions of human forms, all flat and geometric. We know that he did some excavation work, slowly bringing out a figure in the coloured dilution of the paper. His confidence in the accident revealed other human forms. Their eyes and noses marked simply by a line — like those apotropaic figurines where the mouth is absent. Looks like he also chose to hide it, behind a fresh bouquet of flowers.
His interest in flowers lay in the intelligence and ingenuity they display, often quoting Maeterlinck and his fascination with the laws of mechanics, ballistics, and aerodynamics. We know that he loved the child, and the child made him love the universal gesture of blowing on a dandelion to see its feathery achenes fly away. We also know that he composed his bouquets on a large roll of paper that he found along the way. It is said that he had to paint them at night, sheltered from the wind and the sun, breathing in a conscious and controlled manner, so as not to risk shattering the fleeting nature of the charcoal. Did he read the works of D.H.Lawrence, whose poetry gets swept away by a violence devoid of sentimentality ? Did he discover Reginald Farrer, traveler and plant collector, for whom the gentian radiated with its inner light ? At the very least, we can assume that he chose charcoal to create volume through line, and light through nothing but shades of gray.
Finally, we know that he returned. Unlike Ulysses, he returned with his bag still intact, containing all sorts of fragments that he took great pleasure in assembling. These assemblages of nearly nothing, rudimentary shells and feats of balance, became a mirror for anyone daring to look into it, containing a composite and fertile vision of reality, haloed by a fascination with the living.
Exhibition text by Pauline Allié