Micheline LO Series

A series cousin to Vents, nourished by text. In this case, the poetry is not drawn from a collection of poems, but from the subtle words of the wine taster. Fruit, flowers, perfume, velvet, and gold compose cuvées of words. It is up to the painter to wage his battle on canvas to immerse this lexicon in a desirable, translucent liquid, six times red, six times white.

The moment of the final departure [Micheline Lo's death] was drawing near, and wine — with its spirits — lends itself to a farewell. Its hundreds of chemical compounds, its ostensible maturation, its palpable merging of the four elements of Empedocles: Earth (terroir), Water (liquid), Air (oxygen), and Fire (alcohol) make wine a popular cosmogony, mingling the physical, the technical and the symbolic, offering a daily opportunity to activate, soak, and glimpse the cerebral landscape. Since the time of Flexte, the painter of the Chemins des écritures had fused the image of the liquor and the discourse held on its subject.

This was an ultimate manner of causing the analogic and the digital to trigger each other, and above all of weaving together conscience and un-conscience. To someone who remarked that while the project was exciting but impossible, she replied, "I paint only that which is impossible".

She painted twelve Esprits du vin (six "reds", and six "whites") during the grape harvest near the Route des Vins which in Provence goes from her own town, Nyons, to the city of Orange. Among the innumerable wine qualifiers, those she chose almost suggest some self-portrait. The reds conjured up aromas of fruit, coffee, black currant, cocoa, hyacinth, clove, cinnamon, prune, iris, fig, banana, violet, plum, peach, resin, or linden blossom; they were tender, full-bodied, robust, spicy, heady, deep, complete, seductive, elegant, thick. The whites had flavors suggestive of flowers, vanilla, honey, spices, curry, almond, green apple; they were aromatic, exotic, intimate, crisp, cool, tart, vigorous, sprightly, slightly astringent, tempered, enhanced, mellow, charming, scented, youthful.