THE SECRETARY BLOUSE

In choosing, in conjunction with Les Abattoirs Frac-Midi-Pyrénées, to produce a hybrid work, a catalogue/disc, for his exhibition “The Secretary Blouse”, Armand Jalut shows how a soundtrack can be relevant to the appreciation of his paintings. The hypothesis of this text, preface to a musical and critical object, is that it is not intended to be an accompaniment. Like the written contributions here by Julien Fronsacq, the four pieces by Nicolas Dubosc are a commentary on the paintings, an extension or a description such as a text might provide. The strangeness of the mechanical ballet depicted in Jalut’s paintings lies more in the organic arrangement of the machines than in a rational and engineered vision of the world: the banana that grows in the machine, its sweet, tropical scent becoming encrusted on the cold steel; the seagull’s eye with its human character, that of instinctive and animal urges.
The works recorded on this vinyl disc are similarly combined and interlocked. Their composition and execution emerged through dialogue with the artist. If they had been intended as a “catalogue text”, the form would have been that of an interview. They convey the same mood of domestic and ironic exoticism as is present in Armand Jalut’s paintings.