The parade of the Golden Calf

ō amaz ar oxa bāz oxtra xora

(Youth is like the quest of adventure)

2011

Oil on linen

97 x 130 cm

I painted this large painting nearly a decade ago.  It was exhibited at an Open Studio event, so it isn’t completely unknown (or as they say here, “inédit”).  After the Open Studio, it was worked on for many weeks before it was put aside as “finished.”  Being the last painting from a series that I had started when I first moved here, but after that first series was exhibited already a few months prior, it never found its place in subsequent exhibitions that I had put together.  Such was the fate of this painting, ō amaz ar oxa bāz oxtra xora, at least until this year; it is being shown in a public space for the first time, and without significant recent changes, retouching nor reworking.

Moving to Paris, uprooting myself, making this huge leap of faith across the Atlantic, as it were, I found myself needing some arbitrary limits and rules in my studio practice.  No doubt, it was a way to not be completely lost.  So in the paintings from the series I first worked on after moving here in 2009, I prescribed myself a rule, the inclusion of a text in the wardwesān language of 11 syllables, written by the author and inventor of the language, Frédéric Werst, and taken from poems or other writings of the Ward people.  The text had to be placed in a primary position in the painting, had to be painted in Lefranc & Bourgeois Cadmium Red Deep, and could not be incorporated into the image, but rather, had to be a foreign RED presence, un gêne en tant que tel.  Being a transplant, I took on this rule of literally grafting an 11 syllable verse in an imaginary language, trying to make something arbitrary and distinctively foreign, into a painting.

Eight years after its completion, it is fitting that in a show, where the image of the former banker for the Rothschild, Emmanuel Macron, serves as a mascot, there would be a painting with a parade that has a Golden Calf as muse and avant-garde.  The idolatry of money and fortune is no longer seen as a sin nowadays.  In some circles, it is even seen as a virtue.  The good old USA and its old frenemy France both have presidents from the latter category, one perhaps more crooked than the other, but all the same both are certainly idolatrous worshipers of cold hard cash.

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You can see this golden calf at the Duplex Bar, 25 rue Michel Lecomte, in the 3rd arrondissement of Paris through to February 3.  Opening hours there is from 7 pm to 2 am daily.  I will have a closing reception there on Monday January 28, from 6 to 7 pm.  All are welcome, whether you worship the golden calf or not.