The Feast of the Gods, 2004-2012

Exhibited for the first time as part of Marseille-Provence 2013 at the Chapelle des Pénitents Bleus (La Ciotat), Le festin des dieux is a monumental collection of thirty canvases, which, combined in a score, invent and revisit motifs and figures from the history of art.

“...As in India where art and life are not separated, where everything is of the same order: architecture, temples, men, trees, noises, oneself, smells, day, night, the dead, voices and dreams, the statues that one feeds, cars, colors, animals, cows, snakes or stray dogs, landscapes, the sea, its waves, its boats and the fishermen's net... the sky.... everything... As in an immense crazy ark... I wanted to reconcile and bring together in this cycle of paintings men and gods, figures borrowed from the history of men and the history of art, shamans, saints, animals, archetypes or poets, rich and poor, mad, famous and unknown, contemporary or antediluvian, from all continents and all planets. But also to celebrate "all painting", what is eaten and drunk, objects, landscapes, still lifes, sacrifices, eucharists, feasts, frugality, hunger, feasting and leftovers. A horizontal line stretched across each of the canvases plays like a continuous bass that holds the whole together, and resonates with the air, the white and the silence...”

“The salamander is in the workshop”, chantalpetit (extract), 2008

"When this set was undertaken, the Third Gulf War had begun. This period of disaster and apocalypse underlies The Feast of the Gods. (…) In these paintings, everything, the anecdote, the narration or the symbols, is dissolved, covered, metamorphosed and trapped in the strata, the successive layers of paint, and nourishes what we can call the motif. This hidden presence generates, I hope, emotion, enigmaticity, life."

Interview with chantalpetit by Juliette Laffon (extracts), Malakoff, 2013.