Micheline LO Series

The poems of Saint-John Perse sweep across a vast landscape. Great purifying winds tear through libraries, dispersing the stagnation of books and opening our lungs to fresh air: “And isn't my entire page already rustling?”

Would painting undertake almost empty canvases, associated with the great renewal?

After incubation, the project took on a different look. Each of the canvases copies one of the twenty-six poems, both short and long, in its entirety. This resulted in superimpositions, where the surface strokes bury the underlying words, replacing the old with the new, destroying and refreshing. In different colorful climates, with verbal emergences in the graphic fabric.

The two stages of development

Each of the twenty-six poems was copied in its entirety. It was done from bottom to top, starting again from the bottom when the top of the canvas was reached. This was undoubtedly done to imitate the movement of the wind.

The initial goal was to immerse myself in Saint-John Perse without taking pictorial control. That's why I copied everything in relatively large characters, which slowed down the work and allowed me to absorb the text effortlessly.

As I wanted to take a back seat to the author, I imposed a color code on myself. A different color was adopted for each stanza. And within each stanza, a different shade of that color characterizes each verse.

The colors alternate from one stanza to the next. For example, if the first stanza is copied in red and the second in blue, the third is in red, the fourth in blue, and so on.
However, some poems are much longer and consist of several groups of stanzas, which Saint-John Perse separates with asterisks. In this case, the copy creates a new higher-level alternation, such as:
- red/blue/red/blue ... for the first group,
- green/yellow/green/yellow ... for the second,
- red/blue/red/blue ... for the third, etc.

This osmosis took another form through overlaps, with one layer more or less masking the other, destroying it, which corresponded to the writer's relationship with his drafts. Sometimes, in Saint-John Perse's work, ten pages of final text corresponded to a hundred pages of drafts. There was therefore a very participatory process of accumulation and subtraction.

When the poem had been copied out in its entirety, I intervened as a painter, highlighting one sentence or another, lifting it out from the multitude of the background. One of my goals was to give the background a dynamism that would make it compete with the releaded sentence.

Flexte, as did the narration both copied and figured of La Mort d'Harcamone, already had disclosed her intention of crossing the written and the depicted. But not to such a point that the pictorial line be at the same time the scriptive line, and vice versa. There remained a final step to take.

Naturally, she needed a writer whose work would lend itself to this. She chose Saint-John Perse. Born in the French Antilles, those Amerindian islands, French ambassador and poet, Perse precisely had made as his central theme the generation and regeneration of animals, humans, ideas, images, political and commercial institutions, of fervent brains. "Se hâter, se hâter, paroles de vivants". Micheline Lo liked to repeat the last verse of Vents, which adequately expressed her own violence: "Quand la violence / eut renouvelé / le lit des hommes sur la terre // Un très vieil arbre / à sec de feuilles / reprit le fil / de ses maximes // Et un autre arbre / de haut rang / montait déjà / des grandes Indes souterraines // Avec sa feuil/le magnéti/que et son chargement / de fruits nouveaux." It will have been noted that, just as Claudel, his contemporary, Perse expresses himself in verses made up of sections of four or six feet, sometimes forming decameters (4/6, 6/4) and alexandrines (6/6). According, as he says, to Pindar's ideal of the strophe, both strict and broad.

As discipline is the condition of liberty, the painter imposed on herself a strict protocol. She decided to copy each verse from bottom to top, starting again from the bottom when she had reached the top. She used her colors according to an arbitrary code: a given color for a given alternation of strophes. Yet, her brush, loaded with acrylic paint, caused insistences, ruminations of syllables, letters, or lines. In this manner, snags, faults, or slips resequenced the sequences. Yet another way of using the canvas as a field of indices, of making it the privileged site of neuronal connections an cleavages. The workplace was really ready for the Chemin des écritures. For the passage from neuronal formations to the living formations in general.