“Indigo Song”

The painting’s title was suggested to me; it is obviously derivative of Marguerite Duras’ “India Song.”  In her film, Duras transposes the 1974 ruin of the Rothschild chateau just on the western outskirts of Paris, at Boulogne-Billancourt, into Calcutta. Not surprisingly, while speaking of this transposition, Duras has mentioned in interviews that exotic travels in themselves are worthless, it is the internal voyage that counts.  

Duras’ India Song is a profoundly surface-obsessed film.  The over-riding connection is a look, like the dreamy evocation of a fashion magazine spread; the poses of the actors in a make believe swampy French consulate, the ethereal beauty of Delphine Seyrig, and the tall handsome men in 1970’s Yves Saint Laurent suits standing in for 1930’s colonial India.  The film is perverse in its superficiality, as Duras has made it a point to surf on top of the intransigeant bare intrigue of her scenario, and let the actors, the chateau, and the gray dusky light of Paris flicker through almost two hours of projection without committing to any of the usual tropes of cinematic story telling.  The visuals of the film are not in synchrony with the soundtrack, and one ends up getting lost in this sort of delirious rip tide of unaccountable ennui.  Perhaps one of the rare instances where the effect of the film is exactly what the heroine, Anne Marie Stretter, embodies. 

Indigo Song

2017

Oil on linen

81 x 100 cm

Like the film, my painting transposes the familiar to the exotic, in this case, a mundane Parisian street, la rue Gay Lussac, in the 5th arrondissement, is made into the equivalent of the Bardo, that post-life plane of absence/presence, where one is supposedly awaiting the verdict of Lord Yama to be either thrown back into the unending Wheel of Samsara to be reincarnated for another life of haplessness, or, if one is prepared, to reach the Nirvana of nothingness.  In the painting, the apparition of Lord Yama is in foliage, and before him, inscribed against a cast-iron fence, in Wardwesân, the phrase “nazma ab wawēr aran wama zarān” (Nobody can love death). 

This corner of Paris, I have painted many times before.  In the past, the view is taken from the opposite crossing street, la rue Claude Bernard, the view I had while walking to the studio where I painted in the 6th arrondissement.  It was in 2011 that I painted this intersection for the first time:

kent sangar arnawan the kanz wenawan

2011

Oil on linen

97 x 130 cm

In “Indigo Song,” the view is reversed, the same corner intersection is seen as if one were in the background, by the giant, the view I had while walking back from the studio.  Another inversion, in a sense, but also a punctuation, a full-stop, as I no longer work in that studio, as if I were finally leaving that studio behind. 

As in Duras work, where characters float from novel to cinema as inevitable presences, for example, India Song’s Anne Marie Stretter, the heroine, is the anti-heroine of Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein, in “Indigo Song,” elements of the past return time and again — the same corner intersection, Lord Yama, the cryptic verses of Frédéric Werst’s poetry in his series of novels, Ward, and, that full moon, incessantly returning as an inevitable circle that binds, time and again, inescapably transmigrating from one painting to the next.