Joanna Biggar's Blog

The Mirriam-Webster dictionary defines absurd as “ridiculously unreasonable, unsound, incongruous.”

But on a recent trip to Nice, I didn’t really need the dictionary to see what absurd is. What else but “ridiculously unreasonable, incongruous,” could you call those red colors slammed against those yellows, oranges and greens? Those deep rose-colored walls framed inside a blue-that-cannot-be-named. Because this is the Côte d’Azur, after all, the Azure Coast.

Picasso put it this way: “If you run out of red, use blue.”.

I decided to take his advice, and through the work of artists—Impressionists, post-Impressionists, Fauves, Cubists, Surrealists— to follow the blue thread from paintings to views of the landscape to a Carnival parade.From the sea to the sky, you really cannot tell the difference, nor find the words that define a Picasso blue as opposed to the blue of Matisse, whose work hangs in the absurdly colorful museum on the hill atop the city, as opposed to the blue of Chagall whose museum is perched further down the same hill.
But as the artists reflected what they saw in the brilliant tangle of colors, in the crazy, wonderful juxtaposition of shapes and moods and reflections, then took them apart and put them together again, they gave back more than a vision to viewers of their work; they offered an experience.
Call it summer in winter, call it jazz, call it dance, call it blues, call it absurd, call it joy.

Whatever its name, people come to the Cote d’Azur to find it. And so they do, in all its expressions during Nice’s Carnival parade. Shimmying dancers in feathers, raucous clowns, a monstrous purple tarantula, and flower floats in dizzying cacophony shift the limits of reality like multicolored confetti raining down from nowhere.

And blue? How about the iridescent blue-green wing of the giant insect invading the street, the bulbous nose of a bubble-gum blue fat balloon creature, who seems to laugh at the world?
But then there is the giantess of a queen atop her mountainous dress, who is there to say, perhaps, if you run out of blue, use red.
Or the palette of the absurd is infinite.