Malcolm de Chazal PAINTER OF THE FAIRY-ISLAND LE PEINTRE DE L’ÎLE-FÉE The great thinker and poet Malcolm de Chazal first picked up a brush at the age of fifty. Untaught. He left behind hundreds of gouache paintings, showing a fierce attachment to Mauritian nature. They are now being exhibited, in a true whirlwind of colours. À cinquante ans passés, le grand poète et penseur Malcolm de Chazal se met à peindre. Sans avoir appris. Des centaines de gouaches, dédiées avec ferveur à la puissance de la nature mauricienne, et aujourd’hui exposées. Une féerie de couleurs. BY ANTOINE DE GAUDEMAR According to the story, it was watching the daughter of one of his friends paint, in the late 1950s, that first led Malcolm de Chazal to lay his hand on a brush. This major – and often misunderstood – figure of Mauritian literature thus added to his portfolio as a poet and thinker, in his sixties, the page of talented painter. He practised drawing and painting in complete freedom and wishful naivety, without ever having learned, until his death in 1981, at the age of 79. Painting, and art in general, were to him above all a matter of mysticism and inspiration, as noted in 1960 in Le Mauricien: “I do not seek to set a precedent for others; I myself choose to focus on children’s art, which is art at its very origins: instinctual, a natural outpouring.” WRITING WITH COLOURS Malcolm de Chazal was a fervent and abundant painter. Oils then gouaches by the hundreds, an explosion of colours, focused on flowers, birds – including the famous dodo, this “dove of the flood” –, fish, but also trees, stones, beaches, and Mauritian landscapes in their diversity. In his naïve, deceivingly simple polychromic style, he never ceased to marvel at the world’s many wonders. His paintings reflect his attachment, both visceral and metaphysical, to his native country, Mauritius, which he perceived as the vestige of the mythical Lemuria, an ancient collapsed continent. The “fairy-island”, which, following youthful travels, he never strayed far from, and which he never stopped exploring on foot, a tireless investigator of its many spells. Curiously, the more Malcolm de Chazal painted, the less he wrote, as if disappointed by the limits of the verb, of which he had experienced all the facets (aphorism, novel, short story, theatre, press column). As though painting, in short, better reflected “the quintessence found in the soul and body of our sweet country”. UNRULY WANDERER Malcolm de Chazal didn’t really have a home. Unburdened by social conventions, he quickly abandoned his training as an agricultural engineer and the prospect of a ready-made career in the sugar industry for a modest civil servant salary and a marginal existence, at odds with the social class from which he sprung. He was always welcome under his sister’s roof, but he mostly stayed in hotels, such as the Hôtel du Morne, or the Hôtel National in Port Louis. This was where he painted, alone, or occasionally in workshops, along with hotel guests and waiters. On one occasion, he remembers, “I can’t say how, but waiters, cooks, valets showed up everywhere, and everyone began to paint with great enthusiasm.” As a result of this emulation, many fake Chazals are in circulation today, as students have come to imitate their master well. Chazal himself did not pay much consideration to his paintings once they were finished: he gave a lot of them away, threw away just as many did not look after them, and even boasted of having burned 148 finished works on Le Chaland beach one day, in 1962. © Philippe Halbwachs/Blue Penny Museum
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