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About this series
13 portraits, technique on paper, inspired by Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad).
What Micheline LO said about it
The Colombian García Márquez wrote the unforgettable story of a hundred years in Macondo,
a village surrounded by mountains, swamps, and equatorial forest.
The founder maintains a golden age, while remaining haunted by the idea of opening up to the world,
which will first come to him through gypsies, illusionism, alchemical chimeras, and even science.
And Buendía rediscovers on his own that the earth is “round like an orange.”
His numerous descendants accommodate themselves with one or two first names, in a confusing jumble in which everyone lives to the superlative. The painter could not leave these captivating heroes without putting twenty-four of them on paper to see them, physically, with their destiny written on their faces. What Henri VAN LIER said about it
Finally, among the cerebral landscapes, the absolute convexity of Flaubert found a counterpart in the absolute concavity of Gabriel García Márquez.
This time, no "characters" would effect any action inside a landscape or release any imaginary into the real.
Only the immensity of the Amazonia and the Cordillera, causing action and country, imaginary and real,
to be fused into the Colombian mammagallo (feminine-masculine, uterus-clitoris).
Proper names no longer designate men and women, but human bodies, made up of trees, rocks, animals, streams, rough gestures, delusions.
"Aureliano Segundo había satisfecho por fin su sueño de disfrazarse de tigre (to disguise himself as a tiger)
y andaba feliz entre la muchedumbre desaforada (the madding crowd)." García Márquez's disfrazarse is an echo to Carlos Fuentes's esperpanto.
Each word then becomes an oracle, so that the suite of twenty-six portraits open and close on Melquiades, the magus who owns the people's manuscripts, its Poppol Vuh, but refuses to translate them because no one is to apprehend their meaning until a hundred years of non-time of the Continento Eterno — about which his Colombian friend, Heriberto López Pérez, had written his Sueños Epifanias y Porros — have elapsed: "pero se negó a traducir los manuscritos. Nadie debe conocer su sentido mientras no hayan cumplido cien años explicó." Unless some particular circumstance should tear the veil, as for Aureliano Babilonia: "No porque io hubiera paralizado el estupor, sino porque en aquel instante prodigioso se le revelaron las claves definitivas de Melquíades." Micheline Lo deciphered twenty-six figures of warm and humid earth, of human flesh, of animal skin, of vegetal arborescence, of cryptic texts, cramming the sheet on which they were drawn, each time somewhat off center to the left as if to say they were to be viewed and read from left to right. Figures, and narrations. Based on Amazonian coalescences, the drawings were made directly on an embossed board of bark-brown color. Those compact masses she chose to frame with solid, square-shaped wood of varying patinas, according to the web of the rain forest and to human traits. Those portraits were the last which Micheline Lo painted as an explorer of cerebral landscapes. They open a new era of faces. Picasso made a last self-portrait in 1972, in which he fulgurates by the explosion of his look. But in this, he does not depart from the traditional Western vision of an Ego, of a "someone", of a "certain". He concludes a world. Micheline Lo's portraits inaugurate a radically different vision: that of the biochemical brains, inexhaustibly plural, both exogenous and endogenous. She therefore successively explored : |