This portrait is made by connecting memories.
A childhood photograph taken in Parc Fenestre,
in the spa town
of La Bourboule, where I hold in my hands a small aeroplane made of poplar and gauze covered with cellulose.
My friend is holding a winning Blue Riband JEP boat.









In La Bourboule, early in the morning we would receive various treatments: baths, showers, aromatherapy,
all kinds of sprays.
These treatments ended with a journey through the big cloud. We entered a room through an airlock after passing many white sedan chairs. I thought I saw strange creatures through
the glass of a small porthole with a crossed lintel that adorned the chairs.

The Blue Riband was awarded to the fastest vehicles, both ships and locomotives, such as the Normandie liner for its record time between Le Havre and New York, but also the Royal Bavarian Railways’ S2/6 locomotive, with its record of 154km/h, which kept its Blue Riband for 29 years.

The image was still present when, having passed through the airlock, I entered the big cloud. It was soft, moist.
I couldn’t see my feet or my hands anymore, I was floating, and I felt sure I had flown away.

Little by little I began to catch glimpses of fuzzy shapes slipping through space then disappearing, before reappearing again. I heard faint sounds ; I listened very carefully to them, and the sounds became voices,
then a song. Children’s voices filled the cloud
with their thoughts, their joy
and also their melancholy.

A small song approached me and then died away...


I wanted this portrait to be protected inside a Formica-covered box to give it an air of the 1950s.


The box contains an exact reproduction of my 1952 plane, as well as prints depicting the clouds evoking the spa (not a magnificent photograph of a cloud, but simply images of the raw materials of a cloud, taken from sections of clouds photographed on the slopes of Annapurna).  

Reproduction, the wings of the plane, 2018

_{︎ All rights reserved © Jean Larivière, 2022}