SHARING WITH ME

Caca Soleil , 1970  I discovered Hervé Telemaque in New York some years ago when I had been there specifically for the Abstract Expressionism (particularly that of Aschile Gorky and Willem De Kooning). I was bowled over by De Kooning’s women so Telemaque took second place. Telemaque is Haitian and was very mixed up about his identity. I would think that there had been a pervasive racism which intensified his sense of rootlessness. Much of his work is full of emotions in deleted signs, furious words and enigmatic pictograms. From the titles, we discover that there is a sexual anxiety. However, reading a title and then looking at the picture I found it quite difficult to associate the two. Fonds, d'actualité N°, 2002 Toussaint, L'ouverture à New York, 1960 J'ai appris la nouvelle, 1960 Histoire sexuelle,1960 L'annonce faite à Marie, 1959 Autoportrait, 2002 Le moine comblé, 2014 La Séancière 1, 1996 Chauve-souris, 1...

The Jardin de Plantes or the Botanical gardens make for a beautiful walk to the Salpetrière. I walked home slowly last week with Pierrette and could see that our Apple Blossom tree was about to explode into flower. The tree is a sight seeing piece by tourists and the French alike. I go to see it every years and am always taken aback by its beauty. Pierre and I wandered down yesterday to find this...... In front of part of the tree! In the evening looking out of my kitchen window, the sky was ablaze. Springtime is nearly here....

I don’t know if you have the same but there are periods when for no real reason, life becomes a little difficult. I found myself in the Salpêtrière for longer than expected. Thank goodness for iPads! This is not my first first visit but there have been many when I have gone to the Chapelle to see an exhibition. It was there in fact that I discovered Bill Viola. One day early in the piece I was permitted to go out on the strict understanding that I would not leave the grounds. It has quite a history. By the eve of the Revolution, it had become the world's largest hospital, with a capacity of 10,000 patients plus 300 prisoners, largely prostitutes swept from the streets of Paris. From La Salpêtrière they were paired with convicts and forcibly expatriated to New France. The Salpêtrière was originally a gunpowder factory ("salpêtre" being a constituent of gunpowder), but was converted to a dumping ground for the poor of Paris. It served as a prison for pros...

Going back into my archives made me remember just how many times I had seen Jan Fabre. In Brussels, in Lille, in Paris (the Louvre and the Templon Gallery) but I will never forget the incident of his throwing cats in the air and letting the fall - howling. Yet, here was another exhibition with exactly the same title as in Lille Tribute to Hieronymus Bosch in Congo (2011-2013). Tribute to Belgian Congo (2010-2013). For the latter you remember the horrors of King Leopold. A second exhibition at the Templon Gallery. This is a paragraph out of the Lille chapter (And Beetle Crawling all over you - Beaux Arts Lille, 7th November 2013). 

 Jérome Bosch is an emblematic painter too. On one side he carried out orders of churches and on the other he criticized the hypocritical sentiments of the bourgeoisie, frequently making them look burlesque or macabre. Conjugating these monsters then with the Belgium history of the Congo was  an interesting and symbolic way of showing how he saw ...