Spanish suite

Nowhere other than in the desert of sand and stones, do the neuronal connections and cleavages move in a more native way: this was the initial environment for Muhammad, Jesus of Nazareth, Saint Anthony, and Saint-John Perse. As her automobile was entering Death Valley, on the way from Las Vegas, she experienced a malaise and said to her companion, "Should I die now, I would have no regret. I saw what I wanted to see."

This probably is what the "nada" is, the "nothing", the dry soil resounding under the foot of the Meseta which attached her first to the Spain of zapateado, then to North Africa. Ecstasy and blasphemy walking alongside. Dali, the comedian and martyr painter, was seeking for what he called the "geodesiac", a blending of geodesis and aphrodisiac. Micheline Lo relished the distinction which the Spanish language makes between "ser" (essere) and "estar" (stare), the being as a substance and as a pose.

Spain also meant two fraternal painters: Velasquez and El Greco, whose pictorial touch was — as hers — a writing that heralded the comic strip. Les Ménines selon Hergé announced that relationship, in the full size of the original.
Also close was El Greco, which ended up reducing everything to the seven elementary catastrophes of differential topology: crease, fold, dovetail, butterfly wing, and the three types of umbilicus: hyperbolic, elliptic, and parabolic. In Micheline Lo's work, these seven catastrophes also dominate her four versions (morning, noon, evening, and night) of her Don Quichotte s'apprête à affronter trente moulins à vent. In fact, these are the four moments of a Don "Quixote before Toledo", on that path winding down toward the river from which, as she turned around, she had felt the overwhelming, distance-less mass of the city, where she had just seen, in the city cathedral, The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, in which all distance is abolished between the viewer and the viewed.

The four depictions of a stricken Don Quixotte define her realism adequately. On that point, she was adamant: she imagined nothing, "I have no imagination", and only picked up indices, and with this in mind, she observed the canvas: "The canvas is already a physiognomy. When it disappears, fully covered, something has been destroyed. The foreign shapes that appear on the blank canvas, as in the barks, the stains (DaVinci), or the imprints (Max Ernst) are indeed that ‘something'. It is the visionary experience." This involves three relationships which Flaubert could have claimed as his own :

"Absorption". That which enables the cerebral motions of the vision, the painter and the viewer, to fuse into one single tissue.

"Light reflection". "I favor the very thin flax canvas, which shimmers, and go from a dry, dull, or poor aspect, to a sheen. The wet canvas looks like earth or sand under the rain." (The Avant la Tentation de saint Antoine almost remained in that condition.)

"Forward and backward". "A canvas initially possesses a rhythm. If preserved and served, that rhythm creates an enchantment as do kaleidoscopes, mosaics, stained glasses, carpets, or Persian gardens. The shape does not stand out against a background, but is held in it. This third relationship is for me the most important. What I strive for in my painting is that vibration, the sprightliness of a pulsating spectacle. This is far more fundamental, more basal than the avowed directional moves of the straight lines, of the diagonals, verticals, or the cuts. I expect a global, apparitional, almost hallucinatory effect. The essential resides in that pulse, a motion of waves so to speak, in a sea that would stand erect." (One of her leitmotivs will be: "It must advance and retreat at the same time.")