The show – organized in collaboration with the artist before his passing (18 July, Southampton NY) – brings together a selection of small and large-format drawings from the “Cat Doucet” series, made in the mid-nineties, which demonstrate the artist’s creative process. Internationally renowned for his sculptural oeuvre, Keith Sonnier is part of that generation of artists who – since the 1960s – have questioned the categories and media of traditional art, experimenting with industrial materials such as felt, latex, glass flocking, plastic and incandescent bulbs instead. By 1968 he had introduced neon, bending and intertwining the tubes to form light designs in space, characterized by strong emotional content and by references to popular culture, following a very personal post-minimalism view.

The exhibition presents a selection of drawings from the “Cat Doucet” series made in 1995-1996 and inspired by the legendary sheriff and politician Cat Doucet of Saint Landry Parish, Louisiana. Sonnier’s father remembers that, for his re-election campaign in 1952, Cat Doucet crossed the whole county in a station wagon with four large speakers mounted on the roof along with a cut-out figure of a cartoonish cat. Sonnier immortalizes him by tracing stylized and sinuous graphic signs that evoke female shoulders and hips (Doucet was said to be a womanizer), and even cat’s ears and sheriff’s hats, recalling the exuberant character travelling through the territory around Saint Landry, from the swamps of the Atchafalaya Basin, to the areas inhabited by the Okalousa Indians, to Ouachita Parish (as stated by the works’ titles). In a continuous play between childhood memories and early television advertisements, the vaguely anthropomorphic conformations translate music and the sheriff’s amplified voice into fluorescent images.

The series is one of Sonnier’s most evocative. Born in Grand Mamou, Louisiana to a family of French-Acadian origins and raised in a community in which the traditions of the French settlers’ descendants, merged with those of African and Native-Americans, all of which combined to form an exceptional cultural, linguistic and architectural environment. Keith Sonnier considers drawing on paper to be an essential phase in order to obtain an actual simulation of the work, especially in the realization of his light sculptures. Using pencils, graphite and markers, he draws playful and sensual forms capable of transmitting light and colour to the paper sheet as neon radiates them into space. Moreover, through the study on paper, he shows his interest in media and techniques capable of giving a multi-sensory experience of the work. The large-format drawings “Quachita”, “Okalousa” and “Atchafalaya” are made with flocking that provides the coloured line with a velvet effect and, therefore, an immediate tactile value.

Cat Doucet Drawings

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