Ever since Yaya could draw, she has drawn horses. She made long scrolls illustrating each breed and their characteristics. Her notebooks are full of stallions and mares prancing in the margins. She has never owned a horse, though she has ridden since she was five. It remains the one childhood dream she still carries into adulthood.
This exhibition, Cheval Bleu, holds that pure fantasy she felt as a girl — and places it at the crossroads of who she is becoming.
There is a Chinese proverb about a nobleman who loved dragons (叶公好龙). He openly adored their strength, their beauty, their mystical nature. He commissioned artists to paint them across his walls, seamstresses to embroider them into his magnificent robes. He spent a lifetime this way. Then one day, he looked out his window and saw a real dragon hovering before him — and he hid, trembling, until it flew away.
The proverb is about people who love the idea of a thing but not the thing itself.
As she enters middle age, Yaya finds herself sitting with this story. She wonders whether her lifelong devotion to horses — these scenes she paints so longingly, a Palio race at full thunder, a purebred Lusitano in Andalusia, a twilit field and an appaloosa mare standing still before her — is a true love or a beautiful shelter. And she wonders: if she one day stepped inside the fantasy, would she still need to draw it?
She doesn't have the answer. What she knows is that horses remain both a comfort and an exhilaration to draw. She has drawn them with her eyes closed, and she is always surprised by what appears — even now, after a lifetime of knowing their lines by heart.