Eugène et Marguerite

Above: Eugène et Marguerite, 2012, Oil on linen, diptych, 35 x 54 cm 

"Eugène et Marguerite."  It is a sort of tongue in cheek painting.  I was thinking that there are a lot of painters, too many perhaps, who depend completely on photographs to paint their pieces and so I decided to make a painting based on the idea of bad photographs--the kind that you delete or throw away because it is back-lit and you cannot see clearly the face of the person you are photographing, enshrouded in shadows, against this memorable but too bright background.

 There are two "portraits", based on drawings made from photographs of Eugène Green and Marguerite Duras.   Both have made appearances in prior paintings.  

Eugène Green was born in the US but immigrated to France in the late 1960's.   Before turning his attention to cinema and writing, he started a very different way of doing French Baroque theater, using the diction of the 17th century.    Marguerite Duras, French also, but was born and lived in French Indochina (Vietnam) until she was 18 years old.  She, of course, has now become a rather iconic author, essayist, playwright, film-maker.  In my mind, the one common thread that ties these two artists together is that their physical origins are from continents other than Europe, one from the New World, the other from the Colonized Old World.   

In this painting of imagined bad photographs, the two portraits are placed in a diptych à la Lucas Cranach, an Adam and Eve of sorts, with a tree in between them--no leaves, no fruits, no serpent, just a tree with leafless branches.  Behind Eugène is the coast of Normandy and behind Marguerite is the East River and Roosevelt Island . . . a sort of reversal as Eugène Green was born in New York and Marguerite Duras had a residence in Normandy and made the coastal resorts of Normandy the background in her most well-known novel Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein as well as in a film, La femme du Gange, based on the mood of amnesia and the characters of the novel).  

In Eugène Green's films, even when the location is completely elsewhere, their roots are deeply entrenched in the fertile ground of France, and especially Paris.  One thinks of his first film, Toutes les nuits, whose grand narrative arc takes one from the province of France, into Paris, with sojourns in New York City and rural Normandy, but certainly it is Paris where lies the beating heart of the film.  His more recent release, La religieuse portugaise, filmed in Lisbon, in Portugese and French, is in part a love letter to the melancholic beauty that one encounters in the city of Fernando Pessoa, but one has no reservations in saying that the film is seen through the eyes of a French film-maker.  One has the impression that though the entire film takes place on location outside of Paris, somehow, one feels the specter of this Eden, the mannered opulence of the Jardin de Luxembourg, in the airspace of Portugal.  Of course, his most well-known film, Le pont des arts, is completely Parisian in its location, conception and épanouissement.  And most recently, his novel Les atticistes is a full-blown satirical mise-en-scène of the world of Parisian intellectuals of the past half century, which confronts the reality of 21st century post-colonial, post-industrial, post-intellectual Paris--indeed, la New Paris.

Marguerite Duras' work has a sense of not being rooted nor does it grow from French soil per se.  Even though she used different localities of France often in her work, an imaginary resort in coastal Normandy with non-French names and enigmatic initials, S. Tahla and T. Beach, a coastal industrial town in Moderato cantabile, and even when she used her own home in Neauphale-le-Château in the Yvelines as the location for her film Nathalie Granger, the sense of place is completely non-specific and elsewhere, as in a sort of amnestic dream where memories, non-reality, and forgetfulness are intermixed.  The idea of place that one encounters in her work is like the light that pervades her film India Song -- foggy, humid, full of menacing unknown and disjunctions, where time has stopped or is in a very short cyclical sequence of repeats.  Perhaps one can crudely conclude that Duras' work is rooted in her memory of a distant and lost world, perhaps the memory of her childhood in French Indochina, but only in its fleeting and dying memory, full of uncertainty, gaps and lapses that return time and again, and again, like the form of her sentences.