Moths and bats
In her essay The Death of the Moth, Virginia Woolf spoke of its “astounding strangeness.” Astounding indeed is the trembling of those powdery wings, and astounding too the erratic flight of the bat, scarcely discernible at dusk between dog and wolf; a strangeness doubled by the unfamiliar world that is emerging, turning day and night upside down — despite them, and through our own thoughtlessness. By a mirror effect, that strangeness finally reflects more of ourselves back to us, which the painter and the printmaker each seek to render through their respective arts.
It was during a residency in Arles that Djabril Boukhenaïssi created his series of Moths, after one had struck the door of his studio. He recalled Woolf’s story describing the death of one such insect, unable to free itself from the glass that trapped it. Caught within the artifice of its transparent prison, the moth exhausts itself and dies. Boukhenaïssi’s lines evoke the ironic blacks of Odilon Redon, here tinged with a gentle melancholy, as in L’Ennui, or even with a certain nocturnal joy in Feu d’artifice, a bouquet of finely engraved eyespots — multiplied gazes that fascinate without seeing.
Also drawn to the light, not all bats are blind. Some, in fact, have excellent night vision, and on Blaise Schwartz’s canvases they sometimes watch us with a vacant red eye. The secret colors of their bodies, the downy texture of their membranes and mucous surfaces, unsettle our own gaze. We must reorient ourselves — find ground and vault, left and right, plane and depth. Myriads of droplets scatter across the paintings, like in the unlikely vehicle of On the Road: multicolored secretions that recall the depth of the water drops in Delacroix’s The Barque of Dante, themselves resting on the optical combination of four touches — white, green, red, and yellow — from Rubens’s The Landing of Marie de’ Medici at Marseilles. Thus, at the heart of day or night, small miracles of painting and engraving sometimes burst forth.
2025