EXHIBITION IMAGES | PRESS RELEASE | ARTIST PAGE
After four years living in New York City, I left for a village of 30 inhabitants in the South of France. I started to live there, close to the trees, the fields, the sun, the stars, and the wind. And I started to live with animals too. First from far away: the bulls and the birds. Then closer: the horses, sheep, the goats, the frogs, the toads and the lizards. And then very close: dogs and cats. A new home. Cats were sleeping where the night I will sleep. Dogs were licking my hands, my feet and my face and I tried not consider it disgusting. They were walking over me, jumping on my legs and scratching my urban skin. In the evening, at the aperitif hour, we were sharing the same design sofa, if not the drinks.
As a young child because of my asthma, the medical authorities confirmed without doubt to my parents that I could never and never would be able to live next to animals. Yet here I was, drinking, reading, eating, sleeping and making love next to animals. What an affront to my certitude, my beliefs, and my perceptions. A radical transformation was happening. I was not ill and my fear of fangs was vanishing.
One day the master of the animals asked me to bring back bones for the dogs. To bring back bones. I had been bringing back meat only until now. The butcher presents to me a huge bone. He holds it high as if a trophy or a newborn. There is a hole in it and he says it is your next necklace. In one second my imagery runs. I am walking with the bones around my neck. I was a hairy queen, half monkey, half human. I felt a rush of return to the sources, to my joyful and unworried state.
The bones came to the studio.
In oil, pastel cobalt blue on paper 300 grams and 76 x56 cm. Then they grew with oil painting directly, without a sketch, on the primed canvas. Vertical pink green yellow blue black. Horizontal orange green carmine red. Paint like a monkey, a monkey painting, the nose close to the canvas, the color applied directly, the brush screaming of pleasure, my body makes a body with the canvas.
I paint bones. A bones series. No meat, nothing to be digested. The bone. The bone only. The bone to chew. We heard Rabelais telling us to break the bones and suck out the marrow. To chew the bones, the thoughts, the ideas and get to the essence. These bones that in 2001 Space Odyssey are shown to be the tool of the creator or destroyer. Of creation or destruction. These bones that float in Georgia O’Keefe paintings. “The bones seem to cut sharply to the center of something that is keenly alive on the desert even though it is vast an empty and untouchable . . . And knows no kindness with all its beauty.”
The bones, the bread, the blood, the kids, the sex, the love, the money, the marriage, the giving birth, the death, the transformation.
-Anne-Lise Coste
August 31, 2016