Since early 1990, Jean Lancri has devoted himself to a series of paintings and performances entitled the « Cycle du Facteur Cheval à vélo », translated (and explained) below.

In a fictional and humorous way, this cycle evokes the Facteur Cheval, an actual early twentieth-century French rural mailman ( facteur means mail carrier in French), famous for the fanciful architecture of the house he built for himself and, consequently, much beloved of the French surrealists poets of the period.

Ever since the day Lancri decided to revive him and put him back in the saddle of the bicycle he used in his deliveries, the ficticious Facteur Cheval has made appearances at galleries and museums in Brussels (Belgium) ; in Ankara and Istanbul (Turkey) ; in Aix-en-Provence, Amiens, Pau, , Valenciennes, Vanves and Vincennes (France) ; in Oslo (Norway), in Porto Alegre and Salvador de Bahia (Brazil), in East Lansing (Michigan, USA), in Barcelona (Spain). He will presently be in Saint-Petersburg (Russia). But he now parks his bike on this website, from which he expects to be soon riding as far away as this Web-World of ours makes it possible.

The « Cycle de Cheval à vélo » is based on a number of puns in two languages, to do with cycles, of course, but also with the French word for (bi)cycle, VELO, an anagram for the English word LOVE. As a matter of fact, the entire cycle of paintings is based on a reversion and recycling of VELO into LOVE and back again.

And so, when Lancri shows the Facteur out on his bicycle delivering the mail, we might find ourselves wondering whether it is he who imposes his will on the bicycle he rides or rather LOVE in the guise of his VELO which rides him. When the Facteur Cheval takes his bike out for a spin, is it not perhaps LOVE who pumps the pedals ?

The unique ambition of the present exhibition of fragments from the Facteur Cheval’s collections is to raise this question in the glow and glare of its colors.

Biographical data.

* The actual Facteur Cheval lived in Hauterives (Drôme, France) from 1836 to 1924.

* As for Jean Lancri, he  was born exactly one century later : in 1936. Beside being an artist, J.L has been teaching art. He is now a Professor Emeritus in Paris 1- Panthéon Sorbonne University. He lives and works near Paris.

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