A thunderstorm was approaching, and it had started to rain. Émile hurried towards a traditional two-storey Provençal house with its weathered ochre façade, small windows adorned with lavender wooden shutters, and a low-pitched roof topped with terracotta tiles in soft peach and salmon shades.
He was visiting his long-time friend Albert, who lived there, tucked away on the outskirts of the small hamlet of Cotignac. The cypress trees marking the entrance to the property swayed in the strong wind. Émile held his hat with one hand as he made his way up the gravel path leading to the house. Albert saw him arrive through the fogged-up window of his atelier and rushed to the door to welcome him.
“I wasn’t sure you would come, with this weather,” Albert said, holding a paintbrush in one hand, “come in.”
Émile swept his feet on the doormat and stepped in.
“It’s been a while, old friend!” Albert said warmly, as they shook hands. “I was just putting the final touches to my most accomplished painting to date. You must see it!”
Émile hung his jacket and hat behind the front door and followed Albert to his atelier. It was a small, sparsely furnished room with a large bay window at the back. A wooden stool stood by a rustic cabinet, its open drawers spilling over with painting equipment of all sorts, next to a shelf lined with various bric-a-brac and blank canvases leaning against it. A few paintings hung on the walls. The parquet floor was covered in paint splatters of all colours.
“There it is,” Albert said, gesturing towards a painting on an easel in the middle of the atelier, “but it’s not finished yet.”
Émile stepped closer. “I love the colour.” He wiped the droplets of rain off his glasses with a tissue and took a closer look. “I like it. Very nice circle!”
“Nice circle?” Albert smirked, then turned to the painting. “It’s a contemporary interrogation of the platonic assumptions inherent in the problematised subculture that challenges the post-apocalyptic nature of well-established artistic boundaries in a euphemistic, yet transgressive way.” He dipped his brush in blue paint. “To put it in layman’s terms.”
Émile took a step back, squinted at the canvas and tilted his head. “I see… it’s perfectly circular.”
“That’s not accidental,” Albert pointed out, “the circularity embodies the juxtaposition of the vernacular nature that crystalises the conundrum of everyday existence, and the futile temporality of the self filtered through the spectrum of modernity, in a contradictory attempt to create a parodic ambivalence between humility and egocentrism.” He crossed his arms. “The blue represents a liberation from that.”
Émile frowned. “It’s simple but quite complex at the same time.”
“Very much so! That’s the paradox of a futurist depiction firmly grounded in the present. Temporal, yet timeless. Tangible, yet resolutely abstract. That’s what every artist worthy of the name should strive for! ‘La beauté sera convulsive ou ne sera pas,’ as André Breton famously said.”
The wind had picked up outside. On the terrace, sun-bleached chairs lay on their sides, knocked over by the storm. The rain was drumming against the window.
Émile looked around the room. A painting on the wall caught his eye.
“In essence,” he said, turning to Albert and pointing at the painting, “this is a neo-quadrilateral representation of the ethical equilibrium jeopardising our deepest aesthetic fears, extrapolated from the status quo to explore the poetics of space and materiality in a single dimension as a pseudo-homage to the early avant-gardist movement.”
“Erm, no,” Albert said with a shrug, “it’s just a yellow square.”