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About this series
37 paintings on canvas, evoking the existential singularities of animals (terrestrial, aquatic, aerial).
What Micheline LO said about it
Another derivative of Chemins des Écritures. An animal, also appearing by chance, distracted the painter from his original intention
and inspired a bestiary of around fifty figures.
First fanciful, then meditative, until reaching the silence of aquatic animals.
Gradually, the aim was to reject anthropomorphism and rejoin the animal in its difference.
What Henri VAN LIER said about it
A modern-day Bestiary is not an Atlas of zoology, but an array of animal figures on which both author and viewer have asked the following questions:
- What are the topologies, mechanics, and hydromechanics according to which living formations, within a given environment, can develop anatomies and physiologies that are sufficiently stable to constitute relatively viable, recognizable, and reproducible species?
- Each species formation is a manner of practically distributing a portion of a World-around, an
Umwelt (von Uexkuhl). In brain-endowed living organisms, such distribution involved a perception. How do the Whale and the Jaguar perceive their "outer world", their Umwelt?
Can it be possible for us, endowed with our own anatomies and brains, to share in other anatomies and brains?
To what extent do we communicate with an arboreal monkey living with its head down?
The German painter Bazelitz has shown paintings upside down, which offers us, erect primates, and inverted display.
Yet, the arboreal monkey for which the head-down position is natural is not inverted but inverts the viewer,
relativizing his or her erect position as a system of reference.
The Bestiaire thus opens polytopic logics (Bourne, Lavendhomme) for viewers previously made aware
by the Chemin des écritures that perceptions are partly n-dimensional.
On a more anthropogenic plane, what are the "outer worlds" (Umwelt) that are not constructed by
the angularization, orthogonalization, transversalization, referentiality, and holosomy of Homo,
who lives in a Welt and just a Welt, i.e. an Umwelt that is both closed and open by a horizon.
Each painting in the Bestaire proclaims the contrast between the animal conscience and the human conscience, as in Rilke's eighth Duineser Elegien:
"If there was consciousness like ours
in the sure creature, that moves towards us
on a different track – it would drag us
round in its wake. But its own being
is boundless, unfathomable, and without a view
of its condition, pure as its outward gaze.
And where we see future it sees everything,
and itself in everything, and is healed for ever."
(Translation: A. S. Kline)
Given this, how can we better understand the relationship between two types of consciousness
if not through the interfaces between an “internal environment” and an “external environment”?
Pictorially, then, in a contour, a profile, a cutout that, for each animal species, would make us presume the entirety of its interfaces?
And this thanks to a drawing-writing-painting that would show each species cosmogonically.
By proposing bones (structures) that have the luster of skin (texture), skins that have the organization of a skeleton,
to the point of evoking, beneath both, the influence of ultrastructures, with their configurative topological constraints.
Micheline Lo's Bestiaire is amazement and admiration before the existential singularities of animal species, a collection of objective interfaces that activate our subjective interfaces, produces a brain effervescence that is admittedly less general than with the Chemin des écritures, though it is perhaps more intimately mutational.
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