Edito
Y for Yellow, J for Jaune
In choosing to explore yellow in this spring of 2020, we thought we were bestowing a political color to this issue. And yet, no. We'll find no reference to the social movement that shook France last year—except perhaps and indirectly the paint chips literally shot on paper by the Niçois artist Noël Dolla in his recent series “Sniper,” never before exhibited or published.
More modestly, we wanted sunsets too. Those which enflame cities and seasides. And yet, no. No true sunset. A lot of light instead though, in all its forms: light bursting from summer skies in watercolors by Armando Marino, those from a neon tube evoked by Guillaume Linard Osorio, the light that warms colors and wax in the drawings of Luke James, those of the Hamptons town where the American Saul Steinberg spent happy days drawing, as shown in the heretofore unpublished portfolio in the centerfold of this issue.
Here, as Gregory Cuquel says so well of the drawings he gave us, “yellow is rather dazzling, in the white of paper, in sand, or the light of a memory.”
Yellow is in the rice paper on which the painter, illustrator, and writer
Jean-Philippe Delhomme draws his scenes of studio life with black ink. It is in the gold Japanese cards the Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco uses to paint abstract watercolors. They will make this issue shine in much the same way as the glitter that the journalist and artist Laurent Goumarre uses to draw and to enhance his Polaroids. Gold is again in the art and culture spaces occupied by the virtual sculptures by the artist Marie Maillard.
Sand is present in the beach scenes painted by Farah Atassi,
The Swimmer,
The Game, and
The Player. Its even part of certain landscapes on paper by the American Tessa Perutz, made in oil, pencil, and sand from French coastlines.
Yellow is in the blondeness of Ana Benaroya's girls, whom the young American artist represents as exaggeratedly muscular to give strength to women all over the world—like Mira Schor before her, artist and feminist active since the beginning of the 1970s, whose work
Sexual Pleasure from 1998, reproduced here, could serve as manifesto. The political is thus finally and happily present in this issue, whose cover, made by the former graffiti artist and celebrated artist Lee Quiñones, puts the word “Justice” in the center. With a J like Jaune.
