BÉATRICE CUSSOL
"Some collages, some drawings, 2 texts. Béatrice Lussol saves, by drawing them, images feeding on their own appearance to generate others, epidemic at the heart of resemblances.
An image over-remembered, its belly full of an air with the smell of archives, rises from a raked depth to the surface of a doubled world, making a lucky escape from it."
The name of an island
Tomato coulis envelopes you, on the naked shore, you are that slow girl or almost human, merely touching a leaf you go into a kind of ecstasy; you bring back this (positive) image of flight, of a woman alone in the wide landscape with a suitcase – in the high grass.
The number of women who leave or run away believe constantly, shake the real with a form of lost vibration rather than the search for a dream – to go and live in caravans turned green with neglect, tumbledown cottages in the midst of nothing, with the small transistor in the grass, to enter the depth of islands.
They launch a Zodiac with an outboard motor, but prefer to row, row and brood, their rackets around the necks. They reach the green island in an ordinary splendour of dusk.
In the lighthouse, to isolate themselves, to decipher in unison the drawings of writing in the thick vapours of the pond mirroring the colour of ink. The studious apathy resembles a book not yet written with images erect like small show dogs, combed and made up with that stuffing with which one stuffs guinea fowl, but stickier, helped with flakes of repainted saliva. Sometimes they listen to each other talking to know what they’re saying, and they find out. Before beginning it’s better to have an idea of the end, but not everyone has it.
It wasn’t true. They dreamed the island, except the head.
What you understand by beginning reduces the rainbow to the disenchantment of the world.
What they understand by upright: fertile fingers, recomposed, and then speech, redistributed. They hear house, in the podgy defatted fat of the spoken. On the tip of a fishhook the water disappears absorbed by the air.
A female writer figure becomes a destitute bag lady, dirty from waiting, pied-à-terre on all fours, bag lady, constantly chewing tobacco and patching, and could continue. And she keeps the main character for the end, like those people who buy an island: Make your female writer figures into a pearl necklace, then you’ll have some mothers.
All around the suffocation counter-attack, there appears this otherwise red, fortified, hushed habitat on which she settles to the detriment of everything else, and crossing the frame for an unsuccessful escape. An island in the middle of a lake would have been better. The island where one awaits nothing better.
Your oldness I splash about on the surface of the pond like the pith of life.
You don’t know what she understands by a word when she writes it, perceives only its subterranean pulsations. So you paint her, in her hospital environment, in her little hospital bed. The carnage is happening inside the said bed, with a psychedelic incandescence, the otherness nevertheless scattered among the places of the self.
The greatest rioter of them all goes looking for all those who knew the lighthouse keeper during her lifetime. All the circles are gone through, family, friends, inverse radiations. She meets three a day, including one, once, who doesn’t know how to speak. Each trajectory is named on the wide-eyed skin of a card.
This way of being everything. Everything is within reach, on the verge of the fruits of different planets. Where they no longer dream of waiting for anything at all.
Everything is in place and everything is ready to leave, the clan-community of female writer figures gathers and wants to smooth the slide of the voice or speak with a single unified voice, flung out, redivided; tender, booted and helmeted like outrageous noises, the feminists hit the snap of mischief, daub their mouths with butter so as not to utter it, depending on the reputation of the most mature, they would like to be a girl whom one follows with the finger and the eye, but not only. They would like to be a girl. We all would. But not for long, eh? just to see what it’s like.
Mix them. Pure syrup of dubious women.
And it makes: the-girl-to-whom-one-doesn’t-do-it, a girl with teeth that have sprouted in the tongue in which she was conceived. Let her name be the desert of mirrors. The bedtime story right in the face, as if you were deprived of a primal sense.
She is captain dust. Even though she was dressed so simply, grey trousers, tank top, angular, open-necked blouse with a wool waistcoat and leather jacket, she appeared eccentric and mysterious, in the middle of the seedbeds, the herb garden, naming them all, in the paths with crunching gravel.
What does she do when she sees her room in the middle of the street? She transforms it into a vague memory of a lived-in vertigo, begins outlining a career as an author and building the house of the sister of her dreams, ready for the snow, the now famous and never altered image of the corner radiator is a key to the style, and also that of the double partition of tracings.
She who looks, like she goes anywhere, can go in front & behind, but never the girl emanates. Her today’s name on the door does not pertain to a possible identification and fidgets, hardly scotch-taped, she who manages to read it would have to throw away the ladder in making an example of herself.
Béatrice Lussol – 8 April 2016
Translation from French to English : David Wharry