“Melancholy is a disease that consists of seeing things as they are”; it is with this relentless lucidity, so characteristic of him, that Gérard de Nerval penned this sentence.
Foujita, in his own way, also expresses himself on the subject of melancholy through drawing; and the power of his calligraphic line, of his thought-sculpting, magnificently evokes the child and the animal, the expressions of their melancholy. Of their fears, their anxieties…
Fleeting melancholy captured by the artist, a form arrested on spontaneous thought, an unreflected expression, merely experienced.
If childhood and the animal world fascinate Foujita, it is to their share of mysterious melancholy that he refers and adheres; he recognizes himself in it as in a mirror.
Each newly discovered work completes this register. The artist, whose scientific approach might tend to distance him from the pure soul, finds renewal in the apparent innocence of the pure and complex beings that are the children he encounters in his life.
Sylvie Buisson