Micheline LO Series

“If hell were cold and damp,” wrote Genet, “prisons would be hell.” It must be said that Dante's Inferno did not inspire the painter; the poet confessed that his target was heaven, and that he had written Inferno and Purgatorio with a view to Paradise..

Genet knows what he is talking about; he speaks as a companion of the angels of evil, whom he cherishes provided they are not tainted by repentance. The series includes a dozen paintings, around thirty papers, and thirty-five small Indian ink drawings that encrust with drawings the very text of Jean Genet recounting the death of Harcamone.

In the pilgrimage of cerebral landscapes, an Enfer was bound to follow a Paradis. Not the Inferno of Dante, too anecdotal and moralizing, too political, but the real Enfer — that of Jean Genet. The one of Crime and of Glory, of crime's glory. Micheline Lo fondly recalled how, still in her teens, after she had read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, she had become Raskolnikov. As a painter, after she had been Dante and Beatrice, she became Genet's bandits, the more so as Genet did not describe his criminals from the outside, but precisely from the proliferation of their strange neuron colonies. Had he not shared their destiny as a thief, and as a prisoner? A painter, wrote Luc Delisse, is a thief and a murderer..

Pictorially, each "hero" needed to be there, and so obviously in his individual capacity of heroism that he would be recognizable at first sight. A friend who had dropped by one day was able to name each one without any hesitation. But this remained trivial, Freudian, psychological. It was important to attain the Tenebra that made those nights incandescent. The first to attain its glory was Harcamone, with his nose-sex erect as a central Roman pillar, with his aura of miracles, as on that day when his chains were transubstantiated into garlands of roses before Genet's enamored eyes. Then the others, beatified one after the other, made the contemporary system of criminal glory.

Luc Delisse, in front of the portrait of Weidman, the bandit who opened Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, wrote: "pinched lips, low forehead, frightened look, hollow cheeks, an aura of gauze around his head, and a pervert twitch of the nose", "that ash, that misfortune, those eyes of a happy torture victim", "comedy stretching to crime, initiation changed into a Way of the Cross", "everything that could be game and pleasure turned into tragedy, in a universal fire of funeral pump." And again: "Behold this art of dangerous, dirtying, and incompatible colors". "The blue air that evaporates (...) the green and the brown in slices, slow satellites, droplets of blood, delicately greenish festering. And the Red Sea, quite black underneath." "A clotted red, extremely violent, very close to the lumpy garnet of certain velvets, those of the shabby lounge chairs that can be found all over the provincial towns."