“Monsieur Indigo”

At La Belle Hortense, "Bonjour Monsieur Indigo” will feature 14 paintings with 13 full moons, including one that is in total eclipse, and one painting with a cat named Monsieur Indigo contemplating the soon to be arriving dark blue night.

Monsieur Indigo

2011 - 2018

Oil on linen

46 x 33 cm

Monsieur Indigo, the cat, looks a little soaked and wet and he is staring out from the canvas, his body turned towards the sea, so I guess he is, in the painting’s “reality,” a bit perturbed by the maritime humidity, or he may just be a tad bit hungry. In fact, this adolescent stray doesn’t really have a name, no stray cat really does.  He is just a “figurant,” an extra, (as Marguerite Duras told Delphine Seyrig while filming India Song), not the real Monsieur Indigo, but the passing body in which he takes form.  The easy and more sinister explanation would be to say that he is “possessed” but that idea predicates that there is something or someone who is actively taking over.  However, if the “real” Monsieur Indigo is an empty void of the dark blue night, how can nothing possess something?  It is mathematically impossible, or is it?

The other 13 paintings in the show were painted with tonalities based on mixtures of Old Holland and Schminke Mussini Indigo Blue (+/- the “extra”), Old Holland and Williamsburg Payne's Grey, and for the lighter tonalities, a mixture of Rembrandt Naples Yellow Green, Sennelier Parchemin, and Williamsburg Flake White.  There is some violet too in the paintings, Williamsburg Egyptian Violet and Old Holland Ultramarine Violet, toned down with Sennelier Earth Green.  But all in all, these 13 paintings were conceived around the indigo blues and pale shades of semi-transparent/semi-opaque white (or “reflected light” to be poetic).

Monsieur Indigo, the cat, however, is the only piece in the show without indigo blue as its main anchoring color.  The misty yellow grey of the painting prefigures Monsieur Indigo the cat.  He actually sauntered into the foreground of the painting, a marine that I had painted quite a while ago, and simply declared it his territory.  With his feline stare, he was the vehicle that brought many new layers of pigment over the seascape of Saint Martin de Bréhal.  There is, in fact, not one square centimeter of the reworked humid scene without new pigment after this stray cat showed up and took possession of the canvas.