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About this series
10 square paintings on canvas, inspired by a trip to Mexico 20 years earlier.
What Micheline LO said about it
The eagle, the serpent, the jaguar, the corn, the civilization, the sacrifice—all marked by volcanic compression—form a tightened amalgam.
Mayan and Aztec syntagms. The painter returned to Mexico, this time to pre-Columbian times, in ten square canvases. What Henri VAN LIER said about it
The Mexican god Quetzalcoatl was eminently suited to that state of mind [induced by Micheline LO's increasingly intense chemotherapy].
Both the god's name and image attest to the meeting of the Serpent and the Eagle in an embrace, but also devouring each other, at least potentially, while the Owl looks on, with the unflinching eyes of Destiny. Quetzalcoatl, at the same time benevolent and cruel, is the total sum of the divine, the thick blood — the "quik" of Popol Vuh — that circulates between the superior, the terrestrial, and the underworld, merging the viewer and the viewed in one same orgasmic ecstasy of Maya and Aztec sacrifices. Quetzalcoatl was all the more relevant to this painting as the god's figure, being Amerindian, is both written and writing. It is a sequence of squares, rhombuses, rings, and feathers, punctuated by pulsing tropical colors, causing both forms and substance to pulse, so that "it advances and retreats at the same time. " More than with any of the Western gods, it wavers between the analogic and the digital, and musters (re)sequenciation as a general polymerization of rocks, animals, men, and gods. There, any purpose, as it emerges, has already disappeared in the jungle of the means, each head — animal or human — still embedded in the ancestor's head, even then embedding that of the child, reminiscent of the Olmec. Or again, confusing the front of its face-to-face with that of the other's face-to-face, since Chavín de Huantar. Where skin has the quality of bone, and bone that of skin. As in the Bestiaire. |