Artist Guillaume Leingre was born in 1971.
He lives and works in Paris. — leingre.free.fr
Paul Sérusier.
Cylindre d'or, 1910.
Huile sur toile.
Courtesy of Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rennes.
This is a painting by Paul Sérusier, a French painter from the 19th century, entitled Golden Cylinder (Cylindre d’Or). I saw it for the first time in 1986 or 1987 in Brittany, France, at the municipal museum where the painting is kept. I remember an empty museum with hardwood floors and seemingly inanimate guards. The building is divided into two parts: the Museum of Brittany, which is dedicated to popular regional arts and traditions, and the Museum of Fine Arts that features a collection of works, including a masterpiece by George de La Tour showing a woman (if I remember correctly) lit by a candle. This painting is a good example of La Tour's famous mastery of chiaroscuro. In an adjacent corridor, among rather ordinary works in my view, a small canvas entitled Golden Cylinder is displayed. It depicts a “cylinder” that resembles a cork, floating above what seems to be a seashore in a predominantly blue night sky. The cylinder is hanging in the air.
This painting doesn't have an actual subject. I have always thought of it as the product of the imagination of a painter who cherished fantasy or symbolic literature. I don't know if this is true. I remember precisely having discovered it a few days before or after attending a David Lynch film festival. Blue Velvet had a profound impact on me. The scene with Frank Booth (played by Dennis Hopper) and his oxygen mask and Kyle MacLachlan as a voyeur was a shock. To me, this painting is also contemporaneous with the passage of Halley's Comet, whose luminous trail crossed the sky before my eyes as I was driving.
What is this cylinder?Guillaume Leingre
Translated from French by Claire Houdon