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BOUVIER DE CACHARD

by Colin Wilson

Author of The Outsider

Spelling has been converted to American usage.

Authorized by Count Bouvier de Cachard

Published by Gordon’s Fine Art Alpharetta, GA

2003

BOUVIER DE CACHARD 2

Table of Contents

Early History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 3 Early Career . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 3 Biographical Sketch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 5 The Influence of Venice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 8 Magical Style and Technique . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 11 International Recognition and Success . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 12 Philosophy of Art . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 14 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 18

Appendix

“The Man Who Came Back Into Jackie’s Life” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 18 ”Portrait of President Will Be Presented to Mrs. Kennedy” . . . . . . . page 22 “Review of Cachard” in the London Arts Review (Oct. 23, 1987) . . page 23 ”The Long Goodbye” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 24


Early History The painting career of Regis de Bouvier de Ca-

chard began – literally – with an accident. In 1957, at the age of 27, he was a highly successful textile designer, working for one of the major Paris design studios. He had been married since he was 17, and had a daughter; a life of quiet prosperity seemed assured. He found the thought oppressive: the notion of a life that proceeded logically from com-fort to comfort, success to success... One evening, he climbed into his Ren-ault and drove. He is still unable to recollect the details; there were two headlights dazzling him, a swerve, and then a wavering return of con-sciousness and a woman’s voice saying: ‘He’s quite dead...’ It was a rea-sonable assumption, since the car had been crushed flat against a wall, so that its two doors touched. (The car that was responsible for the accident was far heavier, and was not badly damaged.) He experienced a strange sensation, as if he had returned from a distant place, and somehow become another person. Incredibly, the only damage was a crack in his skull behind the ear. Doctors warned him not to exert himself until it healed up, because he could die quite suddenly, without warning.

In a sense, he believes that he died. After the ac-cident, there was a strong sense of a new identity. He resigned from his job, left his wife, and went to Venice. He had a strong feeling, by then, of what he had to do and that was to express himself in paint.

Early Career

What followed was almost as strange as the accident. One day he bought paints and canvas, and in a few hours painted his first picture of Venice. He painted fast, with a feeling that he knew exactly what he wanted to do. When the canvas was finished, he rang up a friend to tell him. The friend suggested he should bring it over. The next morning, he set out with the painting under his arm, the paint still wet. A man passed


him in the street, glanced at the canvas, then turned back and stopped him; he asked if he might see the painting. De Cachard showed it to him. The man was the director of the Gritti Hotel; he asked if Regis wanted to sell it – he offered twenty thousand lire, about twenty pounds. Still bewildered, Regis accepted. The buyer went off with the painting; Regis went back to his own room and immediately painted another picture. Once again, he set out to see his friend. On the way, he stopped at a small restaurant, and went in for a meal, leaving the painting on a shelf in the cloakroom. The proprietor approached his table, explained that a customer had seen the painting and wanted to buy it, and asked how much he would take for it. Regis said twenty thousand lire – this seemed a reasonable sum to ask. And so once again he returned to his room without the painting he had set out with....

I can understand why the paintings sold so quickly. I have seen some of those early paintings. They were mostly of scenes in Venice. He used very few colors – black, white, brown and different scales of red. The buildings loom up massively, as if they are thousands of feet high. They might be made of some immensely heavy black stone. The artist seems to be obsessed by the lines – the slashing horizontals and verticals. And it is the balance between these sweeping perspectives and the immense weight of the buildings that creates the feeling of power and strangeness. Being a writer, I am tempted

to mention H. P. Lovecraft’s vision of deserted cities with giant blocks of ‘Cyclopean masonry’; but this would be inaccurate. He is not trying to create a feeling of menace; only to record something he sees, with the same detachment and accuracy that Utrillo brought to the recording of pavements in empty streets.... But even in these early paintings, one is aware of another element that is always present in his work: the ambiguity of certain shapes, so that the sky seen through an arch might be a face, or the shadows on a facade the reclining form or a woman.

When I first saw his paintings, I was in-clined to regard this ambiguity as a kind


of literary trick, the artistic equivalent of a pun. in fact, it is basic to his vi-sion, I asked him once when he had first become interested in painting or drawing; he said it had been fairly early – at four or five –but that was not what interested him. What he really wanted to explain was his own way of seeing the world at the age of four: that, for example, he could never quite understand why it was not possible to reach out and touch some distant corner of the room. He knew, in a practical sense, that it was impossible; but somehow, the dimensions of space struck him as arbitrary. And the same with time; he could see that it may be necessary for the tape on a tape recorder to travel past the head; but in fact, all the tape is present at once on the reel ... It was not the first time that he had said something that struck me as a’ kind of mystical assertion, with some possible relation to J. W. Dunne and serial time. But he has never read Dunne or the mystics, and when he tries to express it, it becomes obvious that he is trying to de-scribe something solid and concrete, something he feels to be obvious, and sees all the time.

Biographical Sketch

But before speaking further of his painting, let me

offer a brief biographical sketch. Regis de Bouvier de Cachard (I suspect that critics will have to shorten it to Regis, as they speak of Leonardo or Teilhard) was born in 1929 in Asnieres. The Bou-viers (the name means a bull keeper) had existed in the village of Cachard, in the Dauphine, since the 12th century; the chateau still exists there. There was always a touch of nonconformity in the family; sev-eral ancestors were involved in mystical or magical orders – Knight Tem-plars, Rosicrucians, possibly even the Freemasons. One fought in England on the side of the English. Another was guillotined after the Revolution. (Regis says he can actually feel what it is like to be guillotined – not imagi-natively, but as if from memory.) After the Revolution, some went to Rus-sia, some to Spain – one became governor of Valencia. The family fortunes were dissipated, although some members remained wealthy enough. Un-fortunately, Regis’ father was not one of these; and when he died in 1931 – when Regis was 18 months old – Regis’ mother had to find ways of sup-porting her two children. Fortunately, she had talents as a dressmaker; her uncle bought her a sewing machine, and she went into business for herself.


The elder girl Simone – known as Monette – was a talented pianist. Her talents were so obvious that she was accepted as a scholarship pupil at the Conservatoire National de Musique de Paris, where she took first prize at the age of sixteen. Her teacher was the famous Marguerite Long. But it was Marguerite Long’s ‘repetitrice’ (assistant instructor), Marguerite Celerier, who took the greatest interest in Monette. She often came out to the huge old house where Regis’ mother lived with her parents, and she observed that the youngest member of the family possessed the same quick intelli-gence and artistic sensibility as his sister. The two children became the cen-tre of her life; she had them to stay at her house in Normandie, and in Paris she took Regis to the theatre and art exhibitions. In effect, she dedi-cated the remainder of her life to the two children.

Apart from his grand-father, Regis was brought up among women. Until he was seven, he was taught at home by his grandmother – who had been a schoolteacher. Even when he started to school, he made no close friends; he spent his spare time playing around the house with its enormous garden. Like most children, he drew pictures; he also made ‘radios’ out of spare parts, but these never worked (since he knew nothing about radio); it was only that he liked their appearance. It was a Proustian childhood, and one that might have created a Proustian sensibility – as well as sexual leanings. But Regis was basically tougher and more resilient than Proust. At times he experienced an overwhelming sense of tragedy, which may have been a subconscious memory of his father’s death (‘I have a feeling sometimes that the whole world is crying’), but he found life too absorbing for self-pity. The life among women allowed the development of his insight. Shaw makes his Caesar describe himself as ‘part woman, part brute, and nothing of man in me at all’, and this is probably the key to the artistic tempera-ment. Regis actively disliked the ‘man’s world’; (He still finds it boring to be among a crowd of men.) When occasionally presented with toy cars, he smashed them up. He never lost the curious feeling of the ‘arbitrariness’ of the normal human outlook on the world: a feeling that, in spite of the laws


of nature, everything is possible – for example, jumping from the roof and flying.

At the local grammar school, it was obvious that his talent lay in the direction of art. After winning, at the age of 10, the first prize in a national competition for one of his pen drawings, his headmaster suggested he should study art. At 13 he passed art exams with no trouble, and at 14, became the youngest student at the Ecole Boulle (where the average age was 17 to 20.) The sense of design was strong, and he made fabrications in metal that were obviously a development of his early interest in the appearance of his ‘radio sets’. (On the day before writing these lines, I passed a power station on the train, with slim metal towers and insulators and cylinders, and wondered why it seemed familiar; then realized that it reminded me of some of Regis’ paintings – particularly of one called ‘Prophetic’). He enjoyed the life of a student; but now there was also a compulsive desire to break away – perhaps because the home back-ground had been so secure and stable. The constructions in metal, the ab-sorption in abstract design, symbolized a need to outgrow subjectivity, to become objective; and there may have been an unconscious fear of being too close to his mother, and therefore emotionally vulnerable. At 17, he de-cided to leave the Ecole Boulle, and to marry. He began work in The Mar-chasson Textile Studio for Haute Couture and within three years he was often earning a hundred pounds a week. The work came easily; when he came into the studio in the morning, he often began to sketch at top speed to record the ideas that had built up unconsciously overnight.

It certainly looked as if he’d ‘made it’. But as time went by he became aware of a deep inner disturbance. One day the thought struck him that, if things continued like this, he could foresee the rest of his life – what he would be doing at fifty, at sixty. . . . He began to spend hours alone, to drive off at night and sit in the car until dawn, smoking and listening to the rain. Inevitably, this created domestic tensions.


He continued to hesitate for a year, two years. (‘I am a very slow devel-oper’.) Then came the accident, and his life changed overnight. He says that it was a kind of dying; he woke up ‘a new person’.

The Influence of Venice The influence of Venice

was also crucial. He had never been there before that first visit in 1957, but from the beginning, there was something strangely familiar about it, as if he had lived there. The Venice paintings came in a flood – sometimes two or three a day. This was fortunate, since he was still selling them at 20,000 lire each; in spite of the ready sale, it never occurred to him to change his price. Until one day, he was offered an exhibition. Again, this was not by one of his regular buyers, but by a man who stopped him in the street; he had seen Regis walking past with his paintings. Regis accepted, and produced the twenty paint-ings necessary. This time he was disappointed. Weeks went by, and noth-ing sold. He came to the conclusion that his original success had been a fluke. Money ran low; he decided to return to Paris – although determined not to return to designing. (‘I wouldn’t have retraced my steps – I might have robbed banks’.) One day in the gallery, purely as a gesture of defi-ance, he added a nought to the price of every one of the pictures. Immedi-ately, they began to sell; by the end of the week, they had all sold. Appar-ently he had been pricing them too low. They were obviously good paint-ings; people were suspicious at the low price. (A man who tried to sell £5 notes in Oxford Street at ten shillings each – for a wager – had the same experience.)

From now on, it should have been plain sailing; in fact, the real difficul-ties were only beginning. He quickly tired of painting views of Venice, and came to London (where he met his present wife, Sheila). Now he knew he


could paint, the old obsession with the ‘arbitrariness’ of space was making itself felt. He had started by painting ‘close-up’ views – a single building, two buildings, expressing this sense of the monumental, the monolithic. It was inevitable that he should go on to paint wider vistas, panoramas; and these paintings sold even more readily than the ‘close-ups’.

"Sirrocco - Place St. Marc"

by Count Regis de Bouvier de Cachard 1983


“Albert Bridge”

by Count Regis de Bouvier de Cachard 1958


Magical Style and Technique

This is understandable; for the wider range of colors, the use of sheets of water to reflect the strange, spiky verticals and horizontals produced a magical effect, something like Rimsky-Korsakov’s ‘invisible city of Kitezh’ suspended in the air. But he also felt that they were an acceptance of the ‘communal space-world’. The conventions of distance; of panorama, now imposed themselves on the paintings, and consequently on the beholder. Yeats once talked about his ‘wars with God’; Bouvier de Cachard’s wars are with space. He once told me that as a child, ‘people wanted me to be-lieve I was seeing and believing the things they see and believe’, and that his basic urge as a painter is to ‘escape these prefabricated visions and feel-ings that have nothing to do with the truth of things’. And what is this ‘truth’? It is an almost mystical feeling of the real, external existence of ob-jects – which we tend to see through our own eyes, our own feelings, our own trivial preoccupations, until they are little more than dreams. Regis’ vision is intensely Bergsonian. Bergson, it will be remembered, argues that there are two ways of ‘knowing’ an object; to see it from the outside (per-haps to measure it and weigh it) –and to enter into it by intuition, to know it ‘from the inside’. Knowing ‘from the inside’ somehow identifies the ob-ject and the viewer; the object becomes more real, and the viewer also be-comes more real, since he is no longer living in a subjective world, a dream world, in which subject and object share the same unreality.

The more he painted broad panoramas, the further the painting receded from the eye, and the more the object was seen from ‘outside’. Hence Regis’ slowly increasing frustration during the next decade. The paintings continued to sell; peo-ple who had bought them in Venice wrote to ask if he had more to sell; but he felt that they were a falsification of his ‘way of seeing’. The frustration led him to quarrel with potential buyers in London, and with the owner of a Chelsea gallery where he had exhibitions. He was now living with Sheila; and


there were occasions when they actually starved for forty-eight hours or so, and stayed in bed because there was no heating. At what seemed the nadir of his fortunes, he received an enquiry from a buyer in California, who wanted several paintings. Regis replied that he would bring the paint-ings himself if the buyer – a Mr. Levin – would send two tickets to Amer-ica. The tickets arrived; Regis and Sheila sailed for Los Angeles.

International Recognition and Success As far as recognition went, America was certainly a turning point. Mr.

Levin bought twelve of the paintings; a gallery in Beverly Hills kept a more-or-less permanent Bouvier de Cachard exhibition open. Articles about him appeared in art magazines. He rented a studio near Malibu Beach. Prosperity had arrived. And, as usual, he found it ultimately bitter. It meant having a ready market for his old style of painting, when his basic concern was to break away to a new style. From the viewer’s point of view, the paintings became more abstract. In fact, he was struggling to escape the abstraction of ‘distance’, to make them more concrete, to confuse the eye with its ‘normal’ expectations. This resulted in experiments in which, although the painting was apparently ‘representational’, there was an at-tempt to make the dimensions and perspectives ‘indeterminate’. (It could perhaps be compared to one of those optical illusions, where a ball bounces down a series of steps in the top of a square tower – and continues to bounce downward forever, although it keeps returning to its starting point.)

A crisis occurred in the mid-sixties, when Regis and Sheila, now married, went to live in France, in a house near the sea. His income was assured; every painting could be immediately sold in America or Venice, or half a dozen other cities. The house and its surroundings were idyllic. In fact, Regis hated the paintings he was doing; for weeks at a time he was plunged into a boredom that totally devitalized him. He gambled away large sums of money at a local casino. He drove too fast on narrow roads and quarreled with the locals. The dissatisfaction seemed to have turned into a demonic urge to self-destruction. This crisis was artificially resolved when he became involved in a quarrel at the ca-sino; charges were laid against him, and there seemed every possibility


that he might spend several months in gaol for assault. They sold the house and returned to London.

Regis was fully aware that these problems were his own fault; that the real solution lay in solving the basic problem of style. But it seemed ir-resolvable. Expressed in the simplest terms, the problem was to restore a ‘child-like vision’, the almost mystical sense of heightened reality; yet all attempts to achieve this led to further complexity, to ‘tricks’, to deliberate ambiguities; the harder he tried to move towards it, the further it seemed to recede. There was a feeling of living in a ‘painter’s universe’ that no one else could enter. In this universe, the normal laws became untrue; but this was because he felt the normal laws are untrue. ‘We are the masters of how big things are’. ‘People are used to certain dimensions which I don’t believe in’. ‘My aim is to get rid of the brutality of matter – in fact, I don’t believe in matter’. These statements sound mystical or paradoxical, but they are the expression of an objective vision that sees most human beings as trapped in a ‘prefabricated vision’.

Things reached a crisis again in 1968-69, during which time he must have been extremely difficult to live with. (He is, in fact, normally an extremely mild and peaceable person, who can be happy for weeks on end without venturing out-doors.) There were times when he ceased to be able to paint at all, and other times when he was convinced that he would never paint again. As he struggled with the problem, experimenting with new styles, his painting seemed to become increasingly complex, like the hero of Balzac’s Chef-d’Oeuvre Inconnu, and there were times when he believed he would be forced to ‘go completely abstract’, and abandon representa-tional painting altogether. But then, very slowly, a new way of thinking and seeing began to emerge; or rather, it became possible to reconcile his intuition of the nature of reality with his everyday modes of perception. He says with amusing frankness: ‘I don’t say my paintings are better than ten years ago, but I am better. I know where I’m going.’ Once this certainty is established, it is again possible to paint with a feeling of inner equilib-rium, and ‘once you paint with this feeling of equilibrium, your brush gains the same equilibrium, and you can feel it as you paint...’ After the


major crisis at the end of the sixties, his work suddenly surged forward again, this time with complete confidence. He speaks of ‘forgetting the outside light, and painting with your inside light...’

Philosophy of Art What Bouvier de Cachard has done is to solve the universal problem of

the artist in his own terms. All major artists do this, and in many cases, their solutions remain valid only for themselves. It seems to me that Regis’ solution has an altogether wider application.

The perennial problem of the artist is based on the conflict of his vitality with ‘the triviality of everydayness.’ The artist’s chief enemy is always ‘or-dinariness’, boredom, the routine dullness of a life whose purposes do not extend beyond keeping alive or keeping amused. Most people’s minds are irredeemably ‘ordinary’, sticking to everyday reality as a train sticks to the rails, or as a gramophone needle tracks the groove of a record. You only have to read the description of schoolboys in Le Grand Meaulnes of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to recall the sheer boredom of being a child – the way that children spend so much time, doing what the others do because there seems to be nothing else to do ‘The adult world has more responsibility, but hardly more originality. No doubt all human beings have intuitions of a way of thinking and feeling that is ‘free’, more like an aeroplane than a train on rails; for example, Christmas time, or the dusk of a summer day, or the first smell of autumn, may bring an intoxicating feel-ing of enrichment of the senses. In some way, vitality and the powers of the mind seem to be involved, for the feelings of ‘enrichment’ seldom come when we are tired. Perhaps these faculties are simply stronger in the artist; or perhaps his memory of these moments of delight is more tena-cious, so he refuses to accept ‘everydayness’ as the norm.

It was the novelist L. H. Myers (who committed suicide) who found the perfect symbol of the artist’s problem, in the novel The Near and the Far.


The young Prince Jali looks at the desert from the battlements of a castle, and reflects that there are two deserts – one of which is a glory to the eye; the other is only a weariness to the feet. You can only see the glorious de-sert; you cannot touch it, for if you get close enough, it changes into the other one, the desert that is ‘too real’.

Yet there are occasional moments when the two become reconciled – certain moments of intensity or inner-calm when the ‘promise of the hori-zon’ somehow fuses with the ‘brutality’ of present-reality, and the near and the far cease to be contradictory. I suspect this may be the key to the inner struggle of Bouvier de Cachard. He never ceases to be preoccupied with the problem of the near and the far. Those early Venice paintings are full of the ‘promise of the horizon’; but this is because they are far away. Since then, Regis has tried to drag the near and the far together by main force. Since 1969, he has begun to discover how this can be done.

Having said which, it becomes possible to see his development in relation to the main currents of mo-dem art. Before the 19th century, the artist saw him-self as the servant of reality; it was his task to repro-duce nature, in canvas or, in stone. He would no more dream of interjecting his own personality that a television newspeaker would interrupt the news with his own opinions. With Romanticism came the era of self-expression; the artist found himself in conflict with the industrial revolution; he felt buried under the weight of a ‘reality’ that stifled him. He had to find ways of fighting back, of impos-ing his own personality on his material. You have only to look at Seurat’s Bathers, for example, to understand that the artist is coming to terms with the world by imposing his own ‘way of seeing’ on it. In Van Gogh, we see the struggle of the artist’s vision against ‘the world’. The early paintings are smoky and dull. Slowly, the vision burns through, exactly like a fire burning through damp wood or coal dust, until in the last paintings, ‘real-ity’ is illuminated; vision is no longer overwhelmed by the subject. Gau-guin, Cezanne, Soutine, Vlaminck, Munch, present parallel cases. This con-flict is of a different kind than that which produced Durer or Rembrandt.

With the post-impressionists, cubists, expressionists, etc., you could say that painting becomes dominated by the ego of the artist. What the painter aims at is his own style, something that will enable you to recognize one of his canvases across a room. The object becomes less and less important; what the painter is trying to do is to find ways of imposing himself on the object. (For example, I am inclined to see the painting of Picasso, not as an attempt to ‘conquer reality’ through vision, but to find ways of imposing


his personality on the object.) With major painters – like Picasso – this is acceptable, but with minor ones, you get an irritated feeling of petty ego-ism and gimmickry. The danger here is that painting becomes simply a glorified form of subjectivity, a form of ‘culte de moi’. In much abstract painting, and again in Taschism, the object vanishes altogether; in effect, the painter is simply offering you his own soul, and asking you to take it seriously. In literature, as well as in music and painting, this tendency has led to an increasing alienation between the artist and the public.

Without being fully conscious of the nature of this problem, Bouvier de Cachard has nevertheless confronted it squarely. Although he may speak of the ‘destruction of the image’, or of ‘getting rid of the brutality of mat-ter’, he is anything but a subjectivist. It is reality that obsesses him, objec-tive reality. His ideas about the ‘inner nature’ of things may sound like mysticism, but in fact it is a kind of Gallic logic. I recognized the same ap-proach when we were speaking about the Christianity of his childhood (his family were, of course, Catholics). He had no strong objection to Mass and confession, but ‘I knew there was something wrong somewhere’. He added characteristically: ‘A lie is a lie, and you can put your finger on it, but suppression of truth is something awful’.

I believe that the paradox that caused him so much mental struggle before 1969 was the recognition that distance gives meaning and beauty, yet conflicts with the inner-reality of objects. He says that when he looked at a bowl of goldfish as a child, it was as if he was inside the bowl with the goldfish. The earliest attempts to break away from the tyranny of space – in some of the later Venice paintings – often led to a kind of frontal onslaught on ‘reality’, distorting it (selec-tively) into abstract patterns. At this stage, his aims might be compared to Rimbaud’s desire for an ‘ordered derangement of the senses’. Rimbaud wrote: ‘I accustomed myself to simple hallucination: I really saw a mosque in place of a factory, angels practicing on drums . . .’ But this stage gave way, in the late sixties, to an attempt to directly express the ‘inner reality’ of objects – even if this seemed to involve strange distortions. When I first knew him, I was puzzled by a painting of a cockerel, that seemed to be


bursting from inside, like a bomb; I found it impressive, but could not really ‘feel’ it. A few hours later, speaking about the way that painters tend to be obsessed by surfaces, he gestured at the picture and said: ‘For example, I don’t know of any other painter who has tried to make you feel the way it feels to be a cock”, and I suddenly understood.

These are the two ‘poles’ of his vision: the desire to get inside the things he is painting, and the desire to see them from far away, as it through a powerful astronomical telescope. In his most successful paintings, there is a feeling that he has pinned the object between these two modes of per-ception, as if it were held in a pair of tweezers.

Above all, there is a feeling of delight and energy in his painting – a proof of the extent to which he has overcome the basic problems. (He once said to me: ‘Painting is a form of freedom. I live in a different kind of time, space and emotion’.) In some of the Venice and London canvases, there was an attempt to focus the centre of gravity behind the canvas, as if the canvas were a sheet of glass and the lines con-verged behind it; this was an early form of his ‘war against space’. Now the space within the picture may be ambiguous, so the viewer is not certain what constitutes foreground and background. It is as if he had painted the canvas from inside, wandering around among its perspectives. He told me that one day when he had been painting a large canvas, he stepped back from it, and fell into an armchair several paces away – his sense of dimension and equilibrium had been so disoriented by the painting. I looked at the painting – we were standing in front of it – and understood why he disliked the early Venice canvases, painted as if they were seen through a telescope. . . .


Conclusion This is a writer’s view of a painter, and is therefore full of inbuilt distor-

tions and preconceptions – the same problem that has always preoccupied Regis in relation to space and time. Writers are too fond of ideas, of tying things up neatly in intellectual bundles. I must, therefore, end by warning the reader against what I have written above. The paintings are simpler than anything I have said here.

It only remains to add that Bouvier de Cachard has a studio in Venice and London. He lives with his wife Sheila, and Sophie, the daughter of his first marriage, and he spends most of his time in his studio, often working 14 hours a day. He describes his picture ‘Prophetic’ as a magician mixing some strange mixture and waiting to see what emerges. Whenever I see him in his studio, I feel he is an alchemist, trying to create a magic mirror in which reality will be reflected without the distortions imposed by our boredom and mediocrity. – Colin Wilson


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