The Collector’s Bride

Gregory Forstner

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Exhibition from November 15 to January 3, 2015

She was tall, she was blonde, she was the collector’s fiancée. I give her nurturing hips (in addition to the buttocks, I like women’s hips), swimmer’s shoulders (I’m a swimmer), Naples yellow hair (I’m blond) and a colonial helmet from the African bush (I was born in Cameroon). You might as well paint the girls you like to fuck. Stereotypes have a stiff skin, their surface is gold-plated. The desirable girl is therefore blond, luscious, the breasts point hard, her lips are red and shiny. The smoke goes through my fingers. I paint with sugar.

I have a direct link with my childhood. I’m there when I want to be. When I think cloud, I imagine it to be blue. In painting the mountains are always blue. The child on the beach draws the blue cloud. The sky is blue too and the sea below is blue as well but deeper. In the middle it is “empty”, it is the white of the paper which does not ask for anything. It took me a long time to paint landscapes. I have no problem with the wind, the sea, the grass, the cows, all that. When they arrive in the painting, they are there to set a scene. The Fall of Icarus is a good example. The subject is underwater, only the ridiculous feet and the burning calves are visible in the lower right. In the meantime, each of the details of the landscape allows the dive.

Art is compensatory. The painting does not try to say anything. It is a moment. You have to pinch yourself to believe it! No kidding, painting is nothing but pinching yourself to believe it. There is the history and the small history, but in truth, it is always a sensation that slips away to renew itself elsewhere and differently. We hide behind the images of others to appear larger. The rest is conversation. Others have to have fun, alone, we don’t exist. Here, the sky is blue like its clouds, and in the wind the Bride pulls The Collector. The object of the figure is its presence, its appearance is its effect. Don’t look elsewhere. The child begins by drawing what seems essential to him, the arms, the legs, the head, and he marvels. I grew up and I paint what I like: breasts, eyes, pool cues, assholes and hips, scuba divers and sometimes dogs – you always have to paint the things you want – or the things you hate.

I prefer to paint pretty girls. It happens that the paint paints them ugly, but I paint them beautiful. The painting sometimes decides otherwise because around a girl, something always happens that we do not anticipate. In life, it’s the same. It is necessary that the chick complains a little so that the picture turns, she makes the moue, a grimace, and one cracks. By looking for the air of the hostess, one pierces the air of the painting in its bottom. By forcing the stereotypes, the naturalness explodes. By dint of making the gesture, it leaves by itself.

Gregory Forstner