Michel Lentz
Photographer
Tell us a bit about yourself:
Born in 1964 in Luxembourg, in a close, restrictive, catholic environment where 25 years ago they still took Woody Allen for a wild porno graph.
I first wanted to become a violoncellist, but my brother was so outstanding a musician -- a sort of musical genius -- that I finally was wise enough not to try it. I studied mathematics and physics and am now a teacher in "Swiss Collège'' (17-20 years old students, we prepare them for baccalaureate).
Since some years I life a double life, on the one hand I teach my 22-25 hours/week of math and on the other I am in my studio, draw, paint, (autodidact, but I think nowadays, that doesn't mean anything) or I am in my library an write and read (writing, reading, collecting old and curious books is my second passion. Sometimes I read them, sometimes not, actually there are 3 categories of books: there are the paperbacks I consume, actually, "eat", when reading them, there are the books-pure-object, first editions and so on, all that stuff, and there are the books "objet trouvé'' in a Susan Sontag sense, curious things with a curious history).
I am not married and never was. I have no children. I never wanted to live in the same city as my girl-friend. I almost don't sleep. And I am very afraid of dying just now.
What do you make?
Essentially draw nudes and landscapes, and I think these two things are in fact one and the same: a general study in topology. So Geology is the way the world speaks to us: unfortunately it take her some millions of years to say even one single word.
That's why humanity does not understand earth. And women are hoarding places of the love of thousands of generations that lived before them, Their eyes and hearts are as dark and sad as coal which is hoarding the light of millions of summers.
Even if my women may appear in that way, I actually do not see in them sexual objects. I am not at all haunted by sexuality. I do not even need it, sometimes I force myself to need it. On the contrary, I am haunted by platonic love. I am able of great passions, but live almost like a monk.
Where else on the web can we find you?
I began drawing/painting in consequence of a deep writing crisis (I wrote a novel and an book with aphorisms/diary excerpts, I was suffering from the (too big format, apories of style, too intricate state of my) novel, and my aphorisms/diary passages were not published, because they probably were not good enough and because I had no
relationships to editorial circles), this happened some 2-3 years ago. I drew and painted before, but not consequently.
You find me on the net only at FLICKR.
What did you dream about last night?
As I slept but some 3-4 hours this night, I did not dream.
On day I will sleep for a long long time and recover all the dreams I did not yet have.
As I am always in some platonic love affairs, maybe they are my dreams ... Instead
I tell you the last dream I remember (2-3 months ago): I shot dogs with a Glock, explaining: "They have always to know they die. Show them clearly your arm.'' Isn't that terrible? It could be Eichmann's last dream. O my God
What inspires you?
Curious things inspire me.
Things of secret passion.
Indeed I think our world has become quite unable to passion.
People experience passion only in "extreme'' situations: their friend/s wives, husbands left them, they are in ugly divorce affairs, they are In Love Again, theylike too much sex ... But they don't see that passion, actually, is something eternal and diurnal: it is there all the time, all day and all night. So there seems to me to be a close relationship between passion, education, perfect memory of names, photographic memory of things, perfect handling of literary and artistic techniques, perfect handling of sexuality as a mode/model of artistic expression: the artist is not any more excited, but he excites ...) and so on.
Kafka when writing "das Urteil'' (The Sentence) wrote in his diary (23 sept 1912) that he had been inspired the whole night, and that all his ideasand passions had come to him at once "and for all of them
there was prepared a big fire''.
That's inspiration.
Where do you live and what do you like about it?
I live since 1984 in Switzerland, in the most beautiful and most unknown town of Switzerland (please, don't tell people the name of catholic Fribourg, I explain: Fribourg is in it's external aspects as medieval as it is too in it's heart. So e.g. I can not show here any of my nudes, I would risk my job).
What I like: my life in Switzerland is quite anonymous, Nobody cares about me.
What I like too in Switzerland: there are many cheap old things, especially books. Swiss are no really collectors or connoisseurs. So you find astonishing things.
What I do not like in Switzerland: Schwyzertütch.
What I like: the Romand Country(French part of Switzerland). The border between both language-domains is actually going through the city of Fribourg.
I am not a nomad. I am essentially fixed on two places: my studio and my flat.
What is your biggest fear?
To die now or to die very old.
Name a few of your favorite movies \ books \ websites \ bands:
Movies: Chinatown, Annie Hall, North by Northwest, The Apartment (Lemmon, McLane) , Blow up, but also some strange things like Wir machen Musik (Ilse Werner, 1944) ...
Books: all Kafka, all Rimbaud, Gogol, the great Americans Authors living now, Roth, Ford, Frantzen, Lethem ...
I don't like: contemporary German literature,(Germans have done some very very ugly things in Auschwitz that nobody had asked them to do, and they still are blocked by that in ALL they do, they behave, they write, they paint,they speak in a way which is altogether: sentimental and cold and kitsch and annoying)
I like: some French literature: Sollers, Beigbeder, some Italian
literature: De Carlo, Canobbio. English literature, even if I read it in translations.
My favourite poets: Hoelderlin, Bachmann, Celan, Rimbaud, etc.
Music: Classical Music, especially between 1870-1940 (Nielsen, Enescu, Elgar, Magnard, Puccini, Leoncavallo, Czech opera, of course Mahler, Debussy etc. ... )
Jazz especially Jazz trio: Bill Evans, Sarah Vaughan a.s.o. you see, very conventional, standard things, ...I like Mozart piano concertos after ca. KV 400 ... I like Haydn quartets (he copied Mozart, I could show you some places), I like Beethoven quartets (the early ones and late ones). I think I will never be any more able to hear Brahms or Bruckner.
What are you really good at? What are you really bad at:
I think I am too intelligent to think I am really good in something (so I am really good in "intelligent'' ???? O my God).
But anyhow: I am good in quickly doing things in fact I already decided I would not do them.
What I am reallybad in : all the rest, especially cooking, marrying, making children, finishing books, sleeping.
What is your favorite thing to eat?
Maybe spaghetti. But I prefer cheap tea. My stomach is since 15 years in a state that reminds that one of some Renaissance painters essentially nourished by their cadmiumand lead oil colors.
How would you like to be remembered?
When I die, the World is over. No Memory. I think. I live now and here and I have to do and to manage things nowand here. E.g. striving for some social life, you see: the problem is more in me than in the world outside, psychically: my mania of a distance I after all hate, and physically, my terrific stomach aches no doctor here
understands.
What is the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to you?
errible question. Dantesque. I avow: not to have helped some friends when they absolutely needed my help. I was in either a dreamy or in an angry state of mind, I ... I.... shame shame
Anything else you would like to say:
No, I think you saw the paradoxes about me: at the same time, I am quasi a literary exhibitionist and I am in a Kafkaesque way unable even to the first step in life.