2023

PANTALONS POUR ATTIRER LE VENT

PAVILHÃO BRANCO, GALERIAS MUNICIPAIS, LISBON

This title (already in French) came to mind while I was drawing
a kind of a pair of pants that I only realized what they were once I had finished a colored pencil pattern that stretched across the sheet of paper. Next to me, magazines on holistic psychotherapy with articles à la Palo Alto school, Margaret Mead, lots of pictures and The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics catalog. Freud’s couch came to mind, not because of the meaning, but because of the signifier—the Persian rug that unfolds on it, the garden patterns. At the same time, Alfred Gell appeared to me, not the man himself, but what he wrote about “mazes,” geometric amulets, portable labyrinths
to capture—disorienting—the “evil spirits.” (A-mazing) patterns, labyrinths, gardens— portals that in fabrics become portable, enveloping. I first made “uncoated quotes” in A4 format using colored pencils. These drawings are mixtures of signs, shapes, characters, things that suddenly appear, including Ruy Leitão’s tweed. It was like talking to friends alive and deceased, by telepathy. Then came the large gouache formats, made on the floor. The mixture continues but without wandering. The scale already implies sprawling, asking for decision and grains of slumberland. I remember Bollywood posters, open kimonos, wooden-block prints from Jaipur in full-length strips of cloth, hand-drawn advertising from the 1930s, a Christ by Cimabue in Florence that I found by chance
in a cloister, the painter Phan Cam Thuong. Waves and ripples—ukiyo-e. The catalog
Les Maîtres du Désordre was on the prowl looking at me (and not the other way around). I consented. The figure on the cover, toi-même! by Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux, appeared
on one of the gouaches, facing us back, haunting and protecting regions of the mappa mundi. Color dictated the rest. Figures, rhythms and patterns followed one another, intertwined, like cherries and family ties.