ISABELLE BONZOM
"DELICIOUS GRAVITY" BY ANNETTE SMITH
Art collector, Annette Smith is an Emeritus Professor of Literature at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). She has authored books and articles on the general theme of “the Question of the Other,” in the XIXth and XXth Century literatures. She is a specialist of Aimé Césaire's poetry. She is the recipient of a several awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Society of America. Her husband David R. Smith was the founder, director and later Chairman of the Board of the Caltech Baxter Gallery (1971—1987) which specialized in contemporary and avant-garde art and whose archives are now in the Archives of Contemporary Art at the Washington DC Smithsonian Institute, in the USA.
"Showers of leaves in various seasonal glory, depths of fronds disappearing into nowhere, tiny joggers barely distinct from tree trunks. A crowd, human foliage floating down subway stairs. A world perpetually gushing, created by some Danaë?
Her name is Isabelle, a Marie Mancini escaped from Louis Quatorze’s court, kicking up her heels, enormous joyous eyes, a fine waist between generous hips and breasts she manages to display by the very way she covers them.
I, a stranger, want to know why she paints those snowflake shaped dabs that make one feel the brush hurrying down, perhaps toward a final dissolution. She does not know, she says after thinking over it.
Just then, I am standing next to a tiny table on which lie several large lumps of stone, one of them halfway off the support. Instinctively, I push it back onto the table. “No, no,” Isabelle protests in alarm. “ I like things to be about to fall!”
Ha! Here we are! At this exquisite, delicious, frightening point where gravity takes over gravitas.
Wasn’t it Montaigne who wrote that where everything falls nothing falls?"
November 2009