elefantile love

 the elefantile order of danish draft...

 the elefantile command of teutonic rank...

the olifantile rite of dutch ordinance...

pinkbottleblob

a salacious sea creature...a gigantic squeak toy...a rare and exotic flowerhead...a pretty party-dressed mine...
this vivacious vandal's delight squats benignly on the sidewalk, unperturbed by the passing feral urges to kick at its protuberant presence...
 

metal-liturgy

 the french artist Francois Morellet's inter-locking stick metal "Sphere" [1962] floats in one corner - a primitive steel hive model for a futuristic orbiting space habitat...

the german artist Gunther Uecker's "White Field" [1983] of swirling nails maps the galaxies in a square studded universe - where man can orbit only on the minutest speck of iron dust...

[both pieces are exhibited at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Danmark]

of kings and lost lizards

a short distance away from the extreme sculptural opulence of the Pont Alexandre III, a golden salamander bask alone in the sunshine...
in search of the king who had once held it in such high regard to symbolize the mandate of his reign "nutrisco et extinguo"*...

[*"nourish the good and extinguish the bad" - vive la France!]

of kings and old clochards

strung out along the Pont-Neuf  like so many pulled teeth dangling on a chain, these grotesque pearls grimace and glare at the sanitized masses...
they finally found the head of the gallant Henri IV, embalmed and unjuggled, who once crossed over this bridge of vice beaming the glories of France...

gardien d'escalier

the mythical herder contemplates the rise of a steep climb while his baby pan watches for the lost flock...
I descend the winding stone steps and confront their trespass upon my modernist reverie...

[cozying up to greek gods in the Rue de Turenne neighbourhood, 3e Arr]

mater-adora

behind a pane of textured glass she stands in pale wooden folds with her babe in arms gently shielded by a leafy branch... bathed by a watery light the carved hardness exudes a serene innocuity, a fixated imperturbability, the monocarpous mamaternal eternal...

adieu monsieur charles

sitting all alone on the cold hard floor, the dusty and tarnished Monsieur C had been glaring out of this closed up shop for years... I walked by him almost everyday when in Paris and always wished that I could take him home to join my very handsome Monsieur A...

sure enough he disappeared one day and I am missing a bronze ghost, a specter in metal who was once a living entity prominent enough to be immortalized, and now spirited away to a gracious home, or more congested storage, or on the road from brocante to brocante...

[Rue Charles V, 4e Arr.] 

modernisme metalico

 

in Barcelona, in Paris, and in other cities, I am always drawn to overwrought ironwork, decorative and functional, imperially elegant and wildly anachronistic, from the sanctioned designs of master metalsmiths and from the florid imagination of one improbably eccentric architect...

Gaudi, whose astonishing swirly creations elevate a city's architectural heritage to a giddy plenitude of art nouveau flourishes, entwined metallic strands into such fanciful flights, they seem alive and in vigorous flux...

[Palau Guell, Carrer Nou de la Rambla, 3-5, Barcelona]

baguette divinatoire

I huffed up the stairs to the Notre Dame de la Croix [20e Arr.] and was arrested by a limbless but bulbous trunk -
like some mutant tumourous tree of dark knowledge, or a multi-breasted stalk of divine nurture...
a lumpy breadstick of stale godforsaken crumbs, or a tumescent rod of procreative force majeure...

scaling the wall

an abstract symbol composed of snake-scales and bark-veins inflicted onto a blank concrete wall conveys serpentine stasis in segmented curves...
a statutory juncture to contemplate the confluence of sinuous biomorphic skin and static architectonic membrane...

[Rue François Miron, 4e Ar.]

solitary man

one quiet Sunday morning many years ago, I biked by this building when it was a soft celadon green colour...
the white shutters were grimy and the naked young man posing intently above the front door could also have used a bath...
with the sticky surrealist ghosts of Aragon and Breton prodding me on, I was silently beckoned towards this solitary entity hovering above the rue des Solitaires as if...
"Life itself has summoned into being this poetic deity which thousands will pass blindly by, but which suddenly becomes palpable and terribly haunting for those who have at last caught a confused glimpse of it."
[Louis Aragon in "Le Paysan de Paris"]

I recently returned to catch another glimpse, and was relieved to find him still in situ, but considerably spiffed up to seduce younger and more excitable paris-feasting eyes...

sans tête

missing more than just his head, this bottom-third statue of Saint Nicolas still drapes the hems of his flowing robe over a corner niche on the Ile Saint-Louis...
carved onto the stone above the street sign and faintly legible is the more ancient former name of the street - Rue de la Femme sans Teste... perhaps sans tête is more appropriate now for the decapitated St. Nic - and much more intriguing than the present name...
[the older street name apparently alluded to another ancient sign depicting a headless woman holding a glass in her hand, meaning what exactly no one has quite deciphered, even with an inscription of "Tout est bon"...]

chain-link-lace

the art of chain-link crochet made manifest by this example at Le 104 imbues plain-jane fencing with a sublime decorative value... transforming a mundane common-place necessity into giant lacy doilies to mysteriously veil the harsh urban landscape or certain neglected gardens...

[Le CentQuatre, 104, rue d'Aubervilliers et 5, rue Curial... I forgot to jot down the artist's name...]

rejointoiement

from messy working garage to pristine art factory, this slimmed down solo citroen by Gabriel Orozco, our part-time neighbour in Paris, has pride of place on an upper level of the Centre Pompidou...
in the end is it just a lovely old french car cut in half and re-served as a clever sculptural counterpoint to over-slick showrooms of over-sleek new models promising yet more roomy joy-rides...
[or looking backwards in my rétroviseur, I may be slightly regretful for the missing middle...]

ma bête favorite

my secret lion is perched high, shaded and half-hidden amidst a bountiful feast of ripened fruits...
he is sated and watches me lazily as I cross over to the riverbank...
as I venture to the other side across the Pont de Sully...
he was once so blackened that I never noticed him, but when they finally cleaned off the Hôtel de Fieubet, he appeared like a royal vision...
ever le roi de la jungle...

[Hôtel de Fieubet/Ecole Massillon...2, quai des Célestines...dates from the 16th century...acquired by Gaspard de Fieubet in 1676 (he was a chancellor of Queen Marie-Thérèse)...madly decorated by the Comte de la Valette after he bought it in 1858 (he published the Journal de l'Assemblée Nationale)...and subsequently occupied by l'école Massillon in 1877 to the present]

le timide telamone

hiding from the myriad tools of industry, the distracted telamone turns his muscular back to a honest day's work... preferring to hold up his load of ponderous reveries instead...

l'embonpoint

corpulent flesh immortalized in bronze...
voluminous words preserved in print...
the sculptor's hands tire from molding so much corporality while the writer's mind fades out from terminal exhaustion...

[more wordy essay on the museum where this rotund piece resides on Parigigi's site under the "musées" category]

french bleeng

serious bling for the one who wants to lead the most:::
...the emphatic emperor with a nudity clause
...the enlightened suzereine who prescribes junk food for the masses
...the delirious president infected with a napoleon complex
...the bulimic autocrat whose gilded plunder purges corporate dross

[bling by J.C. de Castelbajac displayed at the Musée Galliera, Paris]

la vache sauvage

it's quite disconcerting to think that so much is extorted from this poor shy animal for another species' greedy consumption...
squeezed dry for its milk, cut up for its meat, skin stripped and tanned for leather goods... they were clever to pretend to be mad for a while [although that got some executed, too]!