"...Manda a Zinefrica"
ou l'ailleurs de Guy-Paul Chauder
(extrait)

We have become familiar with Chauder's canvasses, his sails that are unceasingly repaired, hollowed, covered, mended. Those canvasses where he scoffed at the seam, in an always renewed dialogue with this line which crosses the socle ground of his works. We knew his palimpsests where opaque and haunted transparencies revealed all the energy enclosed in the painting. The fire and the strength, the incandescence and the movement of his reds. But also the tremendous depth of the back-story which lays, which throws itself, again and again, into his grays, into his terra-cottas, towards black.

For a long time - maybe forever ? - Chauder has been working on traces. The superimposition of traces. Traces as writing signs also. If these calligraphies, in their relationship with truth, often remain unfamiliar to us, what does it matter ! They induce us to contemplate and open us up to the abyss of his blues. The writing cum picture again is like a plastic thought. A dreamy thought that goes thought the space of the painting like a zephyr incarnate.

Anne Meistersheim

Note on Chauder

Guy-Paul Chauder, who does not remember being born anywhere, reached our coasts twenty years ago. Corsica kept him in one place with his painting, and since then, he has know exactly where he belongs, as there he has found and experienced in a sensual and carnal manner, this intangible yet rich alchemy of earth and men, their culture, permanent passport towards other horizons, other societies which merge and regenerate in the melting pot of humanity.

Stone, in its terrestrial and cosmic expression, has fascinated him ; he has absorbed this material, painted it, sought it, groped for it, improved it is he attracted by its solidity, its immutability from which socles are made ? Is he looking for roots in this stonyland which descends into the mediterranean sea and, through that incomparable mediator, the link to universality ? Or is he simple rolling with the stone towards "Zinefrica", this imaginary region, this unknown valley which can be found in other regions of Corsica or elsewhere, or even better, nowhere ; regions without limits, without laws where man moves without constraints, in this place without substance, this ethereal place, a place favourable to exchanges, to osmosis, to the freedom of thougt, infinite, boundless ?

Demanding, excessive yet tolerant, far from conformity and corruption, he has handed down to us, on this island of sorcerers (I Mazzeri) and witchcraft (L'ochju), the strength of his brown-reds, of his grays, his blues, in essentially harmonious, serene compositions. This mixture of softness and fire reflects the felicitous crossing of his being with his art. His cylinders, his scrolls, his runes, his evocations of parchment, mingled with the stunning symphony of stained-glass windows, express both the elixir of inner peace and the anxiety of self-questioning. Inaccessible mystery of the creation of an ephemeral, transient work, because it is human, with which we wander, in Chauder's company, filled with emotion and solidarity.

Dr Edmond Simeoni

"A Zinefrica"
(Extrait)

Italians rightly call you malmignatta, in the feminine form, using your evil and colour (male miniata) in your very name, demonia spotted tarantula (with thirteen drops of fire) or leech (mignatta) thirsting for red blood...

But this symbolism is too scholarly to affect playful children. And as far as words that carry images, haven't they been created precisely to be tamed, to be softened by them? Close as they may be through their signifier, our malmignattulu andour neighbours' malmignatta do not seem to have aroused in us the same primal fear.

With a zinefra, a zinefrica, on the other hand, the environment was undoubtedly different, we entered an imaginary and feared land which we did not know well at all and often simply by hearsay. I am using a past tense because I am talking of course about a time when our plains were not the resorts and vacation locales that theu have become today, but hostile expanses infested by malaria, with very few permanet inhabitants, where mountain dwellers would venture only temporarily to do work that was absolutely necessary. It was therefore not so surprising that they would feel so little sympathy for lands linked in their mind to toilsome work and real danger, rather than to entertainment and leisure.

That is precisely why "manda in zinefrica" means "tell somebody to go the devil", that is to some country as remote as it is unknown: obvious confusion between the animal and the place where it is supposed to dwell. A place that is, to be sure, not too catholic, if zinefra evokes as for Genoans the very protestant and calvinist Ginevra/Zinevra, a threatening place, much feared as well if the word zinefrica incorporates in its sound a distant and somber Africa.

Jacques Fusina

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