Beware of what you put on the walls, it follows. Take that charming little genre painting, hanging since forever as an icon would, in a bedroom of my family house. Been passing by it for so long I don’t even bother looking at it anymore. I mean, really looking at it. Taking it for granted almost made me miss the point: how deep is the impact it had on me, body, soul, taste, colour, the whole thing. I know now it is the very reason why my mind works the way it does, suspicious, why I’d choose a bowl over a cup a thousand times, and not just coffee wise, and hold it just like that, with a loose but solid grip, bended wrists, shoulders high and face down, arched, lost in some remote and mostly cloudy place where my thoughts go by in bulk and meet no end. Why I move as a giant insect does, fast and quiet, why my body feels like a rubber band, unbreakable, never off duty and always on guard, eager to vanish and yet yearning to be noticed, sharp, so sharp it is not human. If I’ve always found tan uncool is because of that oyster skin, that pale bluish olive shade, as pure as sick. About colours, I am also positive that my obsession for salmon – baked, smoked, raw – or anything rust for that matter, from Italy to clay tennis court, comes from this apricot framing. This, or the peachy squirt of Mayokid I used to drown my steak in, or the coral sour smelling organic wax my mother first heated in a funny grey machine the size of a tissue box before spreading it on my calves when I was thirteen.
And then, there’s the laziness, the loneliness, the fake reading and the white towel covering what it’s meant to cover, the tied up hair, the eyes wide shut and the useless spoon. All in all, the reason why I get bored three hours a day and behave like a convict on parole, why I’m pretty sure I live in the Truman Show, why I’m inspired by all things, why any sad Jean-Jacques Goldman’s song gives me the chills, why wearing a watch seems a non-sense to me and the only understanding I have of time is longing, a promised land whose shores I never reach, stuck between Soon and Late. And consequently, why my desire to learn beats my ability to feel, why I keep a quiet heart, why I like it clean, and why in any given situation, I end up acting the right amount of wrong to let people out, and me, locked in. This is not a painting, or some harmless indoor scene: this is it, the reason why.
Aug 2020.