The Musée des beaux-arts de La Chaux-de-Fonds and the Lycée Blaise Cendrars join forces to present the work of Stasys Eidrigevičius in two separate exhibitions.

In 1985, Yves Velan, an author from La Chaux-de-Fonds, called upon Stasys to illustrate a children’s book that he had long promised to his daughter – who was already an adult. The deadpan humor, the quality of the writing and the themes addressed (morality, visions, language) seem to be aimed less at children than at those who will read it. Stasys, a non-French speaker, is trapped by these lexical subtleties and begins his work thinking he is illustrating the story of a family of cats, not the complicated relationship between a household of humans and a tormented feline. Although he was soon disabused of this notion, some of the drawings seem to have only a distant neighborly relationship with the text and function more as a relay of the imagination. Stasys works in pastel on laminated paper of the same format as the finished book. The different levels of reading of the text allow him to deploy personal motifs such as the superimposition of objects, the telescoping of scales and the transgression of margins.

The reissue of Le Chat Muche offers the dual opportunity to pay tribute to the writer, who died in May 2017, and to exhibit the artist’s original drawings. Some archival documents, correspondence and preparatory works enrich the exhibition file, made with the Association for the promotion of the work of Yves Velan.

Stasys Eidrigevičius was born in 1949 in Mediniškiai, Lithuania. He lives part of the year in La Chaux-de-Fonds.