Title Track: Bonjour Monsieur Indigo

I always thought that it was lazy that rock bands would name their albums after a song in their album, the “title track” as it were.  Why not a variation, a tangent, rather than a title track?  Then, this occurred, many years away from my opinionated adolescence, in 2018, I have done the same thing, having to devour my own words, I have a painting in my show which has the same title as the show itself.

Bonjour Monsieur Indigo

2017

Oil on linen

61 x 80 cm

Why? Well, the truth is that the title of the exhibition came before the actual painting was even finished.  In fact, they came together at the same time.  The painting, is a direct descendant of a painting I had exhibited in my last solo show called “Will Scheidmann.”  I had painted that while traveling in the Eastern foothills of the Pyrenees Mountains last summer.  We were staying in a small village, more like a hamlet really, called Le Bézu.  In fact, Will Scheidmann, being the bandaged puppet that he is, is the progeniteur of all the paintings of the current exhibition.  So despite his crimes, he does find minor redemption.

Will Scheidmann

2017

Oil on linen

54 x 73 cm

I had written in the exhibition’s main statement that              

 “Monsieur Indigo himself is a « ghost » that comes from my own childhood.  When I was five years old, in Hong Kong, it was with him that I curled up against the space heater, during cold and humid winter evenings.  Later, in Los Angeles, it was no doubt because of him that I had a stomach ache every night because I had to go to school the next day.”

As one grows up, these ghostly hidden realities sometimes are placed in the background; the things that preoccupied one’s mind as a child are sometimes and somehow put aside, deep in the unconscious.  But they do not necessarily go away.  Like my fear as a child of the pitch black shadows while walking home in the dark, the primordial phantom of my childhood did not necessarily disappear.  I realized this at Le Bézu.  The nights can be so dark in the remote village that one has absolutely no vision of anything if one happens to walk into the part of the main road that is tree-covered.  Even with the full moon above, one can only hope for the best as one slowly goes forward, hoping not to stumble, while walking the dog without a flashlight.  This pitch black night temporarily brought back the same sensation of fright and dread that came over me as a child when I had to walk through dark unlit paths or rounded dark corners in Clear Water Bay.  

It is as if the same phantom lurks about and he is eternally present, changing the color of one’s life, well into adulthood.  In my case, Monsieur Indigo’s dark blue moodiness never really went away.  Running away from him took me far and wide.  However hard I tried to escape him, Monsieur Indigo, stayed and declared his primordial presence.  

So this resignation, and one years in the making, is not a fatality per se, but like one’s genes, one’s childhood phantoms are there despite the most vehement of battles and protestations.  And thus the title of the exhibition, along with its title track, the lurking primordial phantom is something that needs to be acknowledged and perhaps even embraced,  “Bonjour Monsieur Indigo.”