The raft of the king

Roy Forget : Le radeau du roi (ar wama nenō ab zenenta wartan)

2012; oil on linen; 100 x 131 cm (diptych)

The text at the base of the diptych, in Wardwesân, ar wama nenō ab zenenta wartan, translates into "death makes of us thinkers."  Two comments I received at the opening of my exhibition: 

• "This reminds me of pompier painting"
• "You know how to paint fiction"

In essence, the two comments are inter-related as they both speak to the fact that this painting has a certain narrative bent, and the use of allegorical figures hark back to different devices of story-telling that are rooted in the history of painting, long before the 19th century salon painters used them in their bombastic manifestos of facility and spectacle.  

In an anonymous body of water before a neutral horizon, there appears to be some strange, non-modern activity.  There is a boat, by the looks of it rather wide and flat as it is able to hold a giraffe (specifically, "Zarafa"), 8 persons, a dog and a baboon without tipping over.  This vessel, to give it a more general term, appears to be powered by a rather muscular man wearing only a loincloth, but is strangely enough being pulled also by three horses who resemble foaming waves at the bow.   In the water, despite the slight agitation caused by the three horsepowers of the boat, there is a swimmer, a mermaid perhaps, more likely a sort of sea-monster, but it has a male face and he appears to be looking out from the painting towards the shore of departure.

At the stern, there is a strange figure.  She is the only non-masculine figure in the painting and the only member of the boat that figures in the right panel of the diptych.  She looks directly out at the viewer.  She is Marguerite Duras.  

Above Duras, a flying figure, a monk of Asian decent, and below, the raft of the king.  There is King Louis-Philippe desolately holding his flag, waving in the wind, with his sword, hovering above an obscure reference to foreign rule, and for our era, the rule of capitalism, that accompanies him on his raft, pulled by the boat of Kharon:

18th century B.C., The satyrical papyrus, showing 18th b.c century satirical papyrus that mimics a picture from the sarcophagus of 11th dynasty queen kawit. The cat being sacred to the goddess bastet. The rat symbolizing the rule of the Hyksos, a foreign and Asian dynasty.

The analogy that is made here between the foreign Hyksos rule of Egypt during the Intermediate Period and the domination of our current democracies by "free market forces, is not so far-fetched.  The foreign subjugation of a people, is not different from the "free market," ruled by banks, stock exchanges, and apparently freely elected officials, who impose, for the sake of the "common" good, economic policies that benefit directly this "free market" without really any direct benefit to the most diminished of the people in question.   For those who are unluckily not a member of the 1%, the other, that of the moneyed elite, is a foreign ruler.  Of course,  I am only repeating here oft repeated criticisms of our times, but the roots of this subjugation of the 99%, which has become the holy grail of western economic policy, run deep in human history, where inequality, slavery, serfdom, exploitation are part and parcel of nations, kingdoms, empires, theocratic our otherwise, and civilizations.  

So King Louis-Philippe, with his mice and its subjugated service cats, are being dragged by the ferryman Kharon to the other shore on a raft.  Why the raft? Because the 1% are untouchable and do not necessarily wish to associate with those from whom they profit.  And one generation of exploitation gives way to a second generation of the same, at the shore of departure.