I love Joyce !

“I love Joyce” François Floc’h tells us through a series of works accomplished.
In his paintings, watercolors or sketches, the artist borrows material and chosen tidbits from one of his favorite authors, with delight and appetite, constituting biographical or literary elements and extracts of diverse iconography to render them into a veritable “portrait de l’artist en jeune (hors d’) œuvre” {the French word jeune means both young and a fast, where as hors d’œuvre means a starter but also means outside (hors) of the work (l’œuvre)} where James Joyce would be the pre-text to a visionary allegory of a veritable writer, François Floc’h himself; “the work of Floc’h, part of Joyce, “in some ways …This proves even more true when we know the work process of the painter who “writes his works first” before accomplishing them.
To take only one example of the “flochian” rewriting of the “Joyce cult object,” it is suffices to compare one portrait where the author plastrons himself in an advantageous pose and a second where a triumphant radish, cloaked with an imperious rootlet, finally throws off his joycian mask, like the painter who throws his “plume pudding” {plume meaning author’s pen while sounding like plum, for pudding}: on top of being this trouble sighted light that we know, the author would be the prophetic horror of the white page. L’enfer pour le pas-radis (hell for the non radish, this word sounds just like the French word for paradise)

The writer, although a veritable paradigm of the world creator, is often placed in a position of simple spectator. And in one other work of François Floc’h, James Joyce represented at three moments and in three different attitudes, contemplating with an air at once satisfying, narquois et perplexing, a theatrical irruption of radiferous vegetal in the radiant city, the city of God perhaps?

Finally the last example of this radical telescoping between writer and imaginary pictorial of the painter: another “Trinitarian collage” of James Joyce, (but on the other hand it can also be split in four) is present for the triumph of the Virgin. The writer, although trained in the dialectical jesuitism of Trinity College, can do nothing faced with the radical casuistry of the artist: an apple, sort of original stamp, discovers at it’s center, a clitorisVirgin while the radiant angels radis eux (radishes them, play on the word radiant) sound a vibrant Ave Maria. Before this display, the Joycian Trinity, impotent, can only raise eyes to the heavens.

Gérard Le Masson
Noumea, 7 october 2004