Micheline LO Series

Arabic music, among the array of traditional music, clearly heralds today's music of the living formations. Its sequence is ostensible, because of its restricted scale. It is highly resequentiating, by impatience or by encounter, to the point of reaching paraorgasmic stridencies, giving rise not only to variations but transformations (Oum Kalsoum has up to thirty in one single evening). Here, too, analogies are generated by rerouting of digitalities (for which nomadic people have a propensity, according to some). The musical phrase is not first and foremost a general intent that would generate parts, but rather random events, hazards sensu stricto, where aims, should they emerge, are transitory. Arabic music is noted with dots, lines, and ties, a boon for the painter of the Chemin des écritures.

This time, the painter no longer sought those immanences but rather the instants when, while structures and textures are still palpable, the ultrastructures of stridency turn immanence into transcendence, when saltana gives rise to tarab, sheer intensity of a cry in which everything that has been placed is at once undone. On the pictorial plane, only the green-yellow, that optical center which is prerequisite to the rhetoric of color complementarities, can sustain such ecstasies. It is the color of Islam, religion of non-mediatizable transcendence, which was ostracized by Mondrian. Should green-yellow, then, have covered practically the whole canvas? What we learn from Arabic music is that transcendence can be aimed at only by an inversion of immanences. Here, with respect to color, pink and blue; and with respect to trait, a few ties.

This suite of paintings is a good opportunity to mention Micheline Lo's relationship to music. She played classical music on sight, but rarely except for Scarlatti. She never listened to music while she painted, but she almost always had some sequential music background when she read, as the Chansons à penser africaines, or Lightning's country music. She liked listening to music in loop, and her piano improvisations were comparable to the neuronal experimentation of Flexte.