“…yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”
Ulysse, James Joyce
With this show I want to paint the nighttime thoughts of a woman, the way Joyce does with Molly Bloom’s monologue, at the end of Ulysses. What interests me is the narrative situation: a man describes the inner state of a woman. There is an incommunicability between the man and the woman, a meeting that never works, just as painting is always an abortive encounter. This show is titled “Ulysse, c’est moi/ I am Ulysses”, but it might just as well have been called “Molly Bloom, c’est moi/ I am Molly Bloom”. I’m parodying Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary, c’est moi”, but at the same time I’m well aware that I is also them, her and him and he, the man and the woman who appear in the painting. I am Ulysses also refers to the fact that this book has been with me since I was fifteen, and it’s never stopped constructing me. I’m thinking once again about the episode with the Cyclops asking Ulysses what is name is, and Ulysses’s perplexing reply: Nobody. It is not a matter for him of denying what he is, but, on the contrary, of accepting that a definitive subject doesn’t exist. A transformation of the subject is always possible: the performative elements present in language and in painting are forever illustrating as much.
