ARTICLE

CONFESSIONS OF A YGARTUA LOVER

« Wait, how many do you have exactly?”

To tell the truth, I’d lost count. We’d been collecting our Ygartua originals for over 15 years and they were dotted all around the house. They had become part of the furniture. And, by “part of the furniture”, I don’t mean that in any negative sense. I mean that they had effortlessly been incorporated into our family abode and were now part of the Morgan tapestry of life. It felt like we had appropriated part of the paintings’ soul, or maybe they had taken on part of ours (is that even possible?). We’ll get back to this later.

In the end, I had to go around the house and count the paintings one by one, before I could give a final answer to Tala, she who had asked the question. Of course, Tala is Paul Ygartua’s (or Chiché’s) daughter. More on Chiché later too. 

Anyway, back to the paintings. Let’s take them in chronological order – that is, the order in which we acquired them. First stop, the wall next to the stairs. You know, the wall on the right? We like to call this painting, “le Toulousain”. It was commissioned by my wife, Michele, for me, Guy, to commemorate our 10th wedding anniversary. What’s the typical 10th wedding anniversary gift according to convention again? Apparently it’s tin or aluminium. Well, Michele got us a painting. She met with Paul on one of his many trips over to France and gave him the back story to how we met. In less than a week, Le Toulousain had been created. A wonderful portrayal of a city (closely resembling Paris) on the water, adorned with blues, golds, reds, and whites, with a boat in the foreground sporting the name “Toulouse”. Of course, Toulouse is the city where Michele and I first met – la ville en Rose in the South-West of France. Famous for its cassoulet, wine, and….rugby. In this wonderful tableau, we have a seminal moment of our lives captured for eternity. The soul of Toulouse, the dreaming spires of Paris, and the essence of our love, all captured on canvas.

 Ok, next one. We move closer to the main entrance of our house. If you are lucky enough to be invited in, then look left as you walk through the main door. There you will see another city scene, this time very clearly of Paris, with Sacre Coeur in the foreground. We call it, quite simply, “the heart”. If “Toulouse” represents the soul, then clearly Sacre Coeur is the beating heart of our collection. For me, it represents the cultural bond that Michele and I have with Paris – the city we decided to move to over 16 years ago. Paul also has a strong bond with the city and I’m quite sure he can paint its cityscapes in his sleep, so deeply engrained they are in his essence. To be fair, Paul can pretty much paint anything he has ever seen or experienced from memory. And given he has travelled the world, and lived in North and South America, Asia, all over Europe, including the UK, then he’s got a lot of memories to draw from … .OK, so I added the UK just so I could make a commentary on the ridiculousness of Brexit. But this isn’t a political piece, it’s about our love affair with Paul Ygartua’s paintings. That said, isn’t art sometimes meant to have a political element to it? Does Paul’s? (Note to self – I must ask him how the Brexit disaster has affected his art). But I digress.

As you pass from our hallway into our living room, your eyes alight on the 3rd Ygartua in our collection, “The Ladies”. The story behind this one is that Michele was at Tala’s apartment with 2 of our kids one day, and she saw an abstract painting of exotic women which Paul had just finished. Our kids – Seb and Gabriella – must have been 7 and 4 at the time. We were living in a 2 bedroom apartment on Rue de Verdun in Le Vésinet, with Tala Maillot and her family as our neighbours. We didn’t share a landing with them, so they weren’t right next door. However, Mathieu, Tala’s husband, and I worked out that if you drilled a hole in the wall at the back of our broom cupboard, you’d drill right into their bedroom. Needless to say, we didn’t do that. But it was very handy having such dear friends living so close to us in case we needed anything. In this case, Michele needed some inspiration, which she duly got from Paul’s painting of exotic women, lounging around topless in substantially warmer climes than the western suburbs of Paris. I’m going to suggest that these ladies are from Hawaii – especially since Paul and his wife, Joanne (or Chacha) spent a great deal of time in Hawaii. Word got back to Paul that Michele loved his latest painting so he proceeded to produce another one – slightly different, but with a similar scene of Ladies in the abstract, lounging around, drinking cocktails and engulfed by the most beautiful orange and yellow colours. Michele was presented with the two paintings and got to choose which one she liked the most. And so “the Ladies” came to be in our possession. It’s exotic, never fails to turn heads, and fits perfectly above our sofa. 

Onto number four – numéro quattro. This one is to be found in the master bedroom. You cannot miss its mellow yellow beauty as you walk into the room. It’s an abstract piece, replete with lines organised pele-mele, reminiscent of a North African souk. We call it, “Organised Chaos”, or “the OC” for short. Indeed, my eyes first alighted on the OC at the beach. Not in California I should add, but in St Jean de la Rivière, Normandy, at the Maillots’ holiday house. Their house, situated a stone’s throw from one of Normandy’s stereotypically vast beaches, with Jersey visible in the distance, is the epitome of organised chaos. Especially when it is bursting at the seams with people, which it typically is during the summer months. We have had the distinct fortune to be invited there with our family on many occasions, and our kids have grown up with the Maillot kids there, going out fishing on the boat, playing marbles on the beach, and looking for crabs on the rocks at low tide. Now numbering 7 kids in total between the two couples (3 for us, 4 for them), we throw all the children up in the attic, while the adults are either in the upstairs bedroom or one of the bedrooms downstairs. On this occasion, Michele and I were in the guest bedroom downstairs, which looks directly onto the beach, and the gorgeous expanse of water beyond.  As you throw open the curtains in the morning, the most scintillating light streams into the room. It could be raining everywhere else in the country at that moment, but in St Jean, with its micro climate, it will be beautifully sunny. Anyway, as the light streamed into the room, the Paul Ygartua original which was hanging on the far side wall was bathed in light. Its mellow yellows and organised chaos (from a North African souk) burst into life. I ran into the kitchen where Tala was frothing milk for our café lattes and panted, “How much for the OC?”. The thing is, you can’t put a price on feelings like that. I had a real need to capture the sensations that I had – the immense joy of being in St Jean with our young family, the sound of the waves lapping against the shore, the sight of the incredible rays of light dancing across the walls of the house. This particular artwork had bottled all of this up for me, and I knew it would radiate those feelings every time I looked at it. Once again, Paul had captured part of the soul of a particular place for me in his artwork, and I was projecting my own experience onto it. By this stage Paul was in the kitchen in St Jean as I was trying to explain why I needed another Ygartua original to Tala. He just nodded as I prattled on about how much I loved The OC, interjecting only once to confirm that I was indeed talking about the painting, and not the TV series. Truth be told, I was talking about both the artwork and the house.

You know when your iphone recalls random photo memories, organizes them according to a certain theme, then plays them back accompanied by auto-generated background Muzac? Well, as I was writing this piece, various photos of family members stood in front of Ygartuas started playing on my phone, which must have been listening in to our conversations of late, as we reminisced about our collection. Rather than being freaked out about our loss of privacy in today’s world (that’s for another piece, just after the Brexit one), I’m just glad that the AI at Apple HQ has now officially recognised Ygartua paintings as a theme in its algorithm. As I was humming along to the generic Muzac, a picture of our Ygartua numbers 5 and 6 came up, so I decided to pause it. There stands Gabriella, my oldest daughter, aged 8 at the time, at one of Paul’s art sales in Le Louvre. To her left is a vast painting – an explosion of different colours on a bright pink background. People who have seen it, see whatever they like in it. For some it depicts a metropolis, for others it’s a scene from inside a particularly colourful black hole. To Gabriella’s right, there is an equally vast painting, this time an explosion of different colours on a white background. Again, everyone interprets the scene in a different way – the beauty they see is very much in the eye of the beholder. I distinctly remember talking to Paul and Joanne, Chiché and Chacha, about which one would look best in our house. It was the middle of the afternoon on a Sunday, and it had clearly been a long weekend for Chiché and Chacha. They suggested I take a load off and join them in a glass of Burgundy. As we sipped our vin, and surveyed the two paintings, Chacha, ever the amazing saleswoman, asked, “why don’t you just take both of them?” Of course, how stupid of me. The two are a pair. They complement each other perfectly. They were painted to be together, forever. Just like Chiché and Chacha. Our Ygartua numbers 5 and 6, which we call Chiché and Chacha, now adorn two walls in our sitting room. 

A couple of years later, we were back at the Louvre to see Paul and Joanne again. Paul had been working on portraits of indigenous Canadians for a number of years and some of these pieces were on show. As I sat down to enjoy a glass of Burgundy with him and Joanne (déjà vu, anyone?), Paul showed me a photo of himself on a ladder putting the finishing touches to a mural he’d been commissioned to produce of an aboriginal Canadian, specifically of a First Nations tribal leader. The mural probably measures 10 by 5 metres – it’s truly immense, and stunning. I’ve promised myself that we shall go and see it in situ in British Columbia some time. Paul is such a prolific artist. He’s told me he can paint for days on end, producing sublime works of art almost effortlessly. Now, having been in this situation before, I knew how this session at the Louvre was probably going to end. But we were feeling more reasonable. Explaining this reasonableness to Joanne, she reminded me that Paul also produces smaller sized pieces. We were with our 3 kids who, being life long Ygartua fans, reminded us that their rooms were pretty much the only ones without an original Ygartua in them. Now I’m no mathematician, but even I could see the equation being formulated by Joanne and the kids. And so we acquired three smaller paintings. One of a truly magnificent aboriginal Canadian, in traditional headdress, and then two smaller versions of Chiché and Chacha – our Ygartua numbers 5 and 6. These three pieces go together, just like our kids, so we call them “Uno, due, et tré”. 

Which brings me onto our final Ygartua. Ygartua original number 10. It’s amazing to think we have acquired so much of Paul’s artwork over the years, and that each piece has got a context and a story to it. Each piece has got a part of my family’s soul and lived experience in it. If you were to put our pieces together, they’d probably cover a tennis court. And it would be the most wonderfully eclectic court you’d ever seen, full of different styles, colours, and ideas. Signed Ygartua.  For number 10, Michele was at a Ygartua “vernissage”, or showing, in Le Vésinet.  There have been several vernissages in Le Vésinet over the years, organised by Mathieu through his Les Cercles enterprise. Les Cercles is both a real estate agency, and so much more besides. To illustrate this “so much more besides”, Mathieu endeavours to host a showing of Paul’s artwork whenever he is in town. It’s an invitation to explore Paul’s art, in the presence of the artist, while quaffing champagne and canapés. The vernissages end up being wonderful social occasions, to catch up with old friends, and hear what has been inspiring Paul most recently. I recall on one occasion the vernissage being held in a vast Vésinet mansion. The house, belonging to a client of Les Cercles, must have had at least 10 bedrooms. It’s immense ground floor space lent itself perfectly to showing off Paul’s art, with the aboriginal Canadian portraits in the living room, the cityscapes in the dining room, the natural landscapes in the study, and everything else in the nooks and crannies in between. The drinks and canapés on this occasion, as with all the Ygartua vernissages, were being served by the Maillot children, our children, and the children of various friends of ours. It was an occasion which combined family, friends, art, and the odd discussion about property.  Alas, a work deadline prevented me from being at this latest vernissage, being held at the Les Cercles agency in the town centre. As I put the finishing touches to a PowerPoint presentation from my office in Paris’ first arrondissement, my phone lit up with a text from Michele. “Hi….so, I’ve just bought another one.” To which I responded, “another what?”. “Ygartua” came the reply. Followed by a smiley. Our latest Ygartua, and certainly not our last, is a scene inspired by the Okanogan Wenatchee national forest in British Columbia. It’s where Tala, Mathieu and their family now live, and it’s Paul’s artistic rendering of the view from his daughter’s new life and house. You’d expect the painting to be mainly greens and browns but instead, he’s painted the firs, spruces and pine trees a mixture of orange, red, and yellow. They look like surf boards, inviting you to jump on and explore the natural landscape beyond. And so, number 10, is called “Surfer’s Paradise”, and is hanging on one of our walls in the basement. 

I called this piece, “Confessions of a Ygartua lover”, because it feels like my family has had a 16-year-old love affair with Paul’s art. What I know is that this love affair is not a fleeting one. Rather, it is one which will endure, just like the memories we have made in the process of acquiring our Ygartuas. And there are still many memories, and Ygartua originals, to come. Of this I am certain.

Essay by GUY MORGAN, CHANEL SUSTAINABILITY DIRECTOR, PARIS

THE GUY & MICHELE MORGAN COLLECTION

Collection will be updated

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