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About this series
13 compact paintings, evoking “The Battle of Macar” (chapter 8 of Salammbô, Gustave Flaubert).
About La bataille du Macar
Under Flaubert's pen, the mouth of the Macar, a Tunisian river, is surrounded by barbarians and Carthaginians fighting a battle.
Elephants, horses, and camels mingle with men, blood, and cries.
Rising, advancing, retreating, sinking, crashing... they undulate in landscapes brimming with imaginary worlds, currents, foam, whirlpools, movements... About Salammbô
In Salammbô, it is rare to know “where you are.”
The ebb and flow of shadow/light, noise/silence, brutality/sensuality, sweetness/nausea intertwine, overlap, accumulate, pile up, and suddenly disappear.
Micheline LO, painter of “cerebral landscapes,” found inspiration there for 72 works, including 13 for La bataille du Macar. What Micheline LO said about it
This was an important milestone for the painter.
She had read Salammbô more than thirty years earlier, and it had become ingrained in her memory like a volcanic rock that remained hot.
Flaubert makes thickness radiate. Events and states of mind are constructed so richly that they imprison the reader,
panting under the accumulation, captivated and amazed by a kind of glowing lava.
It is this that the painting sought to make visible in some fifty approaches: paper, silk, canvas.
What Henri VAN LIER said about it
The reader will recall that, when she chanced upon La Tentation de saint Antoine, it was in fact Salammbô that she had been looking for.
Her Salammbô had been latent. This was the only time that she went on an initiation journey.
She was staying at La Marsa, and on her way to Tunis she would daily go through Carthage, or rather through its remaining shadows. Naturally, she spent some time in the Taphet, known for its child sacrifices. She was able to read, on columns, accounts of those sacrifices, kept in Phoenician writing, a system that shared the purely accounting cursiveness of Aramean and ancient Hebraic writings. She saw the Cap Bon, from the vantage point of what is supposed to have been the port used by Hamilcar and the young Hannibal. One night, she had tea, seated perhaps on the very same chair where Flaubert had been sipping his. The cerebral landscapes of Flaubert's Salammbô have a special quality: they are absolutely frontal and compact. Only the Etruscan sculptors of that same epoch appear to have viewed certain faces in this manner. Let us recall the phonosemics of the text, which opens on the most compact phonetic pair of the French language: "K-A" and A-R", "KAR" (C'était à MéGAra, faubourg de CARthAge dans les jARdins d'HAmilKAR), and closes on four enclosing"T"s (Ainsi mOURut / la fille d'HAmilKAR / pour avoir Touché / au manTeau / de TaniT). With the painter, this produced faces-substances, those of Hamilcar, of Shahabarim, of Spendius, and of the young Hannibal. And lastly, the puffed face of Mâtho, filling the whole frame, which advances toward the distraught face of Salammbô, who faints. "Figures", in the most epic of senses. So solid are those faces that the artist finally resorted to the pure pigments of pastel, and thus created six "esperpentos", of an almost mineral substance. We know how Heinrich Schliemann must have felt when, as he was excavating the site of Troy, he suddenly faced the mask of Agamemnon. The painter seems to have gone through the same stupefaction as she faced the Carthaginian masks embedded in Flaubert's consonants and vowels. Flaubert's narrative elicits the same compactness as do the figures. Mâtho advances in an aqueduct whose ground slopes upward while its roof slants downwards as he walks on. Micheline Lo retained the narrowing, the maximal orgasm of the narrative, that moment when the Barbarians, lured by the Cathaginians in the Thermopylae, end up being crushed there in a lake of stones and blood which is in continuation of the one where Saint Antoine had walked. The Bataille du Makar are mineral and visual crushes in pure state. |