Jean Le Gac • WI Séduction

I met Redolfi at an exhibition at Catherine Issert Gallery in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, during the off-season. Amid a handful of acquaintances who had dropped by from the neighborhood, he had probably been speaking for some time when a remark casually tossed into the conversation caught my attention:

“…complete freedom to create an artwork in one of the rooms of the Windsor Hotel, of which he was the fortunate owner.”

It took me back to a distant time when, together with another artist, I had mailed fifty keys to an empty apartment on Rue Rémy Dumoncel in Paris to various people from the art world.

Those who made the effort could discover, pinned inside a closet, two captioned photographs that I had left there. This kind of ontological encounter with art would later find other applications, one of them on the scale of an entire city, involving a whole contingent of delighted artists. It brought greater fame to the curator of the Ghent Museum than the international exhibition Documenta, for which he later became responsible.

In what Redolfi was planning, I perhaps vainly recognized the trajectory of my own thinking returning to me, carried by that faint, moving vibration of a boomerang. I seized it again for the pleasure of feeling the speed it had acquired.

There was no longer any need for a destabilizing artistic gesture to draw you to the frontier of art; at the Windsor Hotel, you cross it almost as soon as you have unpacked your bags.

For the intermittent painter that I am, someone who has worked with artistic dispositifs in both the most prestigious and the most disreputable settings, where the ambiguity of art is fully manifest—from a shabby ballroom rented out for wedding receptions to the interiors of the Élysée Palace and the National Assembly—there was no hesitation. I chose Room 79.

I brought there a single personal object.

In doing so, I had the feeling that I was bringing an entire chapter of art to a close, and freeing myself from it.

We were very young when my companion made this modest sewing kit, so perfectly suited to the idea of travel. Think of the soldier who carries one, regulation issue, in his campaign pack; think also of the prehistoric hunter of the high mountains discovered in an Alpine glacier, whose tiny bone needles were found intact inside his birch-bark backpack.

On ours, you will recognize the famous philodendron-leaf cut-out by Matisse, who made Nice his home while Picasso chose Cannes.

My illumination came from this relationship between white and Matisse’s laundry blue.

For the patriarch, the room became profoundly important at the end of his life. A domestic Sardanapalus, he ruled his little kingdom from his bed, directing both the nimble hands and the shapely backsides of his muses perched on stepladders, pinning his beautiful colored paper cut-outs to the walls.

I also thought that after Matisse Blue and Klein Blue, the only option left for a passing painter in Nice such as myself was to apply for “Tuareg Blue.”

I have some claim to it, since the two painted figures shown here are replicas of two others that I used in the mural paintings and video installations in the cells of Fort Sainte-Marguerite. You may well find yourself going there if the painting in your room succeeds in drawing you into my treasure hunt.

Jean Le Gac