Blue cow

Text taken from the La Vache Bleue catalog

The project was inspired by the camembert label of the brand La Vache Bleue. This food image suddenly struck me with its geographical and cosmic aspect. Indeed, the large spot on the animal's back evokes a continent. The circular shape, the gold, the sky blue, the midnight blue—all of these elements combined to simplify the great mother cow into a terrestrial and celestial form, transforming her into a metamorphosis of the planet. The blue and gold also evoked memories of Byzantine mosaics. In particular, I was reminded of the starry vault of the tomb of Galla Placidia in Ravenna (5th century).

It was with this ambitious project in mind that, while in Drôme at Christmas 1987-88, I drew up a dozen sketches of the surrounding mountains, grouped around the majestic peak of Mont Ventoux. I vaguely titled this "Prologue to the Blue Cow". The project itself got off to a slow start at the end of January, with cows sometimes streaking across the sky, milk sisters of the Milky Way, sometimes flattened on the ground, like planispheres. About twenty of these papers, generally measuring 50x65 cm, were made available to the public in May-June 1988, during the opening of the artists' studios in Saint-Gilles, over three successive weekends.

The one-square-meter canvases that followed, painted in the summer of 1988, were influenced by a desire to get as close as possible to the animal, heavier, thicker, sunk into its immense, ruminating, immobile, almost mineral body, yet full of milk and straw, and [influenced by] the vast serenity of its gaze, whose animal nature I always sought to preserve. Defying the Vache Qui Rit [a brand of cheese], whose gaze is human.

In September, I made a few monotypes, very similar to the image of the camembert. They were designed to look like medals. Their light seeks to recreate the effect of a gradual reappearance of the engraving, like an oxidized medal that a stripping agent would revive, until the image becomes legible.

The few large canvases that followed correspond to the maturity of the project, playing on one aspect or another. Thus, variation 36, an oil on canvas measuring 2x2m, which could be called Polar Cow, superimposes, in a sort of filigree taken from a bird's eye view, the starry sky around the North Star and Europe, turning to the cold of icebergs. The last two paintings are marked by the spirit of the subsequent project. Crossed by very large swathes of sky, they prepare the ground for the fourth series of Dante's Paradises, which has since been started.

Other excerpts

[...] As for La Vache Bleue, what a paradox that a map should sprout from a living body! It is a series that stands apart, driven by tenderness for our fragile planet, with the ever-present paradox of its colossal fragility. [...]

[...] Around forty papers and canvases were produced from the label of the Camembert box of the same name. The cow's skin with its geographical markings and the generosity of the milk-maker have inspired a tenderness for planet Earth, our blue nurse. [...]

Was there anywhere a figure that would sum up, almost all at once, the cerebral landscapes which the human neurons project onto the real landscapes? One more portrait, but of the entire Planet?

There was at the time a camembert cheese on the market sold under the brand name of "La Vache Bleue", and its label indeed depicted a cow, colored in blue. As she saw it lying on her breakfast table, the painter who maintained she imagined nothing, but only read the indices present on the canvas texture, began to recognize there universal maternities, maps of countries and continents, an atlas of the starry sky, the Dream of the fatfleshed and of the leanfleshed kine.

About sixty drawings and paintings, of all sizes, were made with such names as the Vache espace, the Vache grande île, the Vache ciel, the Vache Méditerranée, the Vache nuit, the Vache arc-en-ciel, the Vache Alpes, the Vache Terre, the Vache truie, the Vache bois brûlé, even the Vache Galla Placidia, from that tomb near Ravenna, which is the most celestial tomb in the world with its lapis lazuli mosaic. All visitors, from the committed politician to the botany teacher, were surprised to be able to fully breathe again in the apnea of the art of the time, which had been through the "Support-Surface" current. Not only in India is the Cow the deity of a religion which does not have any unbelievers.

At the time of the exhibition, a text by Luc Delisse commented on the virtues of the canvas as weaving, and accidents of weaving. "The canvas is waiting, becoming tense, in a silence fit to cry. Then, slowly, some life ebbs in. Mountains change colors, become bluish. Crystal after crystal, they come off the surface. A frosty sky, all mist and transparent pleasure, occupies its arbitrary place. Nowhere, where the wheel turns, do stains, powder, and mites reappear. Transcendence, eh? Is that the word? Transhumance! Say no more!"