LEVIATHAN
From the Greek shores to Troy lies the Aegean Sea, dwelling place of the brooding Poseidon, and in its abysses, a monster where Chaos breeds: the Leviathan. Its scaly armor shimmers like that of the sirens inhabiting the Cyclades, lying in the grass at the water’s edge, upon the dry and hostile rocks of the ataraxic seas, surrounded by heaps of bones and the desiccated flesh of the men they have slain.
Their song heralds the uprising of the earth’s entrails, of its sinuous skin turned into the tomb of Greece, of its myths and treasures, where for centuries have remained, within these twists, these embraces, these strangulations, the Discophoroi and the Achilles of Alcamenes. Countless are the shipwrecks and their treasures lying buried in these deep arsenals, which Orpheus, through his song, summons to the table.
Leviathan is the resurrection of a song, of the pelagic empires and the lost Atlantides. It is Greece and its centuries, it is the threat of shipwreck and of downfall, under the serene gaze of the old sages and the summer suns that shine, turn mud into gold, and kill.
Leviathan is the song of the Argonauts, it is the song of the Aegean Sea: the Aegeneides.
URBI & URBINO
Walking among the ruins of fallen Rome, I see the Discophoros caress the Dying Slave, and the gaze of Antinous, from Hadrian’s villas to the banks of Egypt, reminds the hearts of men of eternal Rome and of its disappearance. Then, buried in the debris of memory, the Tuscan spring and Botticelli’s Venuses awaken the lost Italy with a kiss.
Up there, on that hill, the perched capital of the Montefeltro and the princes Della Rovere, Urbino busies itself with geometric revolutions and metamorphoses of majolica. Its cypress-lined avenue, hieratic and multiplied like a mirage, retraces in its shadow the scenes of a mythological, supernatural world, between ideal, refined architecture and the dramatic opulence of human passions.
Urbi and Urbino is the blessing that art gives to life, the divine to the human, the purity to the opulence, geometry to profusion, the gift of Grace to the table.
NEVERLAND
In the wild grasses of a childhood garden, cut off from the world, insular, behind rusty gates overrun with ivy, stand the memories of summer lunches in the shade of linden trees, of dozing in the grass, of palaces of dreams and clouds flying over the ridges, of drunken boats and mint lemonades.
The spirit escapes into this elsewhere that appears to it with such clarity: that of bounding rabbits and talking rosebushes, butterflies resting on a finger, fingers saying hush, brushstrokes of ants splattering the bricks.
Then, behind the groves, appear mysterious paths, bordered with wild strawberries and gooseberries. The lily of the valley chimes like crystal glasses, and the water, like a diamond, in pearls, flows from parrot tulips and the wide unfurled petals of lilies, royal ibises ready to take flight.
In this alchemy of dreams that our growing minds, alas, forget, the ugly weeds are harvested into golden hay, and the miserable insects are set as rings of opal, malachite, and heliotrope jasper.
This shimmering empire then resounds from all sides, parading in great splendor of imagination in these secret childhood gardens, which some spend their lives transforming into a galaxy of cosmos and Windsor roses, through the inclinations of a heart searching all its life for its homeland and its home.
FLAUBERTINAGES
Each time, before the sulking plate, when the boredom of the meal twists the mind and severs the taste buds, it is Emma Bovary who grimaces at her fate, dreaming of what is not and could be, unsatisfied, captive turtledove and headless hen. Plates bordered with butter, Norman, like the Proustian steeples of Coutances and the hills of Calvados, rich and generous lumps framing pastoral and picturesque scenes, the grotesque epics of this Norman bocage, the Flaubertinages plates invite us to a bourgeois and burlesque reverie, a drunken summer poetry, to the bucolic frivolities of peasant weddings.
Flaubertinages is the inconsistency of a flirt, a little love affair, amused bushes, the bonfires of Saint John, never mind the beer mugs and lemonade, the boisterous cafés with their dazzling chandeliers. The eyes wander across the table, a cornucopia of woven silver spilling out flowers and fruits, the generous harvests of late June and September; in the polished baskets and goblets, poppies to nibble and sugared sunflower seeds; grapes roll down to the feet of the characters in this scene, in this theater, white bucolic biscuits with brushed toes, lifted petticoats, whimsical goats and singing cherubs.
On this table rises an entire landscape, a climate, a horizon, the generous and humorous memory of a land, of a June evening, of a basket placed on the grass, of the Norman bocage to the dreamy walks of a queen in her idealized countryside.