Mathieu Laca, Jean with Mandolin (detail), oil on linen, 122cmX92cm, 2017
About me ...
Jean Comeau
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I am the unwanted child of an atheist and anti-clerical churchwarden and a light-hearted but hysterical actress. I was inflicted with primary and secondary school in the darkness of the fifties. Catapulted into the university at seventeen into an educational system on the fringe of falling apart as it desperately tried to cope with Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, I survived thanks to the virtues of my somewhat artificial paradises. There, my right ear was raped by the sighs and gasps of Claudel while the left was taken by Genet’s pornographic adventures.
When I was six years old, my mother would sit me down in front of an old piano whose ivory keys were robbed for their lustre under the diabolic gaze of a master whose fingers were as stern as they were aged by arthritis. A few university years later, I didn’t have a penny left to pay for my lessons. I wrote for theatre. Its scene bored me to tears. I taught: anything. I played piano. The flute. I taught: anything, everything; I flirted with the church organ, completely high; I thought: anything, everything: Claudel, Genet, music, theatre, sculpting, the art of storytelling, of telling pornographic tales, and others I’ll spare you. My dream. Unattainable stardom. The expanding horizon of total and ecstatic joy: to become a dancer. Failed! Now retired, I take my vengeance on the mandolin. The victims of this regrettable tragedy: my husband and dog—I am their karma! (Translation: Sanita Fejzic)
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