Rainbow Rousseau - Pierre Loti's Cat

Henri Rousseau's naïve jungle paintings provide the pictorial source for this silkscreen, with the specific reference to Pierre Loti's cat adding a literary layer. Pierre Loti, the nineteenth-century French naval officer and writer who famously lived in Japan and wrote Madame Chrysanthème, kept a celebrated cat named Moumoutte; Rousseau painted cats with the same flat-edged, dreamlike quality he applied to his jungle fauna. Ay-O imports Rousseau's composition—dense, frontal foliage with an animal subject—into his rainbow system, replacing the original's muted greens and ochres with spectral progressions that cycle through the entire visible range across the plant forms and the cat. The landscape category reflects Rousseau's lush, impossible jungles, which function as interior landscapes of the imagination rather than observed nature. Silkscreen's flat color zones are ideally suited to Rousseau's own flatly modeled forms, creating an unlikely formal affinity between the two artists across a century of printmaking history.