About

Interview with artist and art writer Mathias Durand-Reynaldo :

“Kay Quattrocchi is a very surprising artist, not to say… confusing! Her life is so intense that if a great writer ever decided to make a feature film, he wouldn’t know where to start. The easiest way is to tell the story randomly. She won’t mind, since Kay’s conceptions of space and time are not necessarily in phase with those of her contemporaries.

Despite an Anglo-Saxon first name, an Italian surname and a Greek mother, Kay is French and spent her childhood in Indochina. That said, whatever the nationality, Kay is universal! As a teenager, she was repatriated to France while the Vietnam War was raging.
Her experience of war over the years gave her a keen sense of the essential. In France, she discovered at the same time, thanks to her television set and the Apollo experiment, that technology is not only at the service of war, but also of “human genius”. This blend of materials, knowledge and intelligence has given rise to a technology not far removed from military genius, but in the service of peace, Kay understands. While she may not become an astronaut, she definitely knows she has the soul of a scientist! With her passion for astrophysics and philosophy, and her search for the link with consciousness, she began a lifelong study of the subject.

Logically, one might think that her destiny was set. And yet, just a few years later, we find her hosting radio, television and cinema in Tahiti! This is without doubt the most extraordinary aspect of Kay Quattrocchi’s life. Chance, synchronicity, destiny, it’s all intertwined. To the point of believing she’s living parallel lives. And that’s not all! We won’t go into her adolescence in Martinique, Morocco and Ceylon. Nor will we talk about her Catholic and secular schools, her daily visits to the Buddhist temple with her Indochinese nanny, or her Orthodox upbringing on her mother’s side. It’s impossible to say it all! Kay is everywhere and nowhere at the same time, a citizen of here and there, with no country and no religion. She’s a timeless, elusive woman. Yet she seems to carry a message. The answer lies in her art. To understand the artistic complexity of her character, it has to be said that she can paint anything! Her mastery and technical level are such that she can embrace any style. That said, it’s important to note that, whatever time or manner Kay uses at any given moment, her pictorial journey is always directed towards the same quest: the link between the universe and us. Wherever she goes, art accompanies and guides her on her journeys. She crosses the Atlantic (from St Martin to Greece) and the Mediterranean on the mythical Ketch “Kriter” (and yet she’s afraid of the water!) She has also visited Paraguay and crossed Martinique and the Congo again. She has escaped death 3 times, and seen it up close: her “altered states of consciousness” and her near-death experiences: Another way to travel… All these experiences have gradually enlightened her, as her paintings testify. In French Polynesia, in search of spirituality, she developed a particular interest in the “Marae”, Polynesian sanctuaries, and attended certain rituals to understand “Mana”. She studied Tahitian traditions, tattoos and ornaments. She took notes and produced thousands of drawings and paintings. One of them is even featured on a stamp in a worldwide philatelic collection! Not feeling like a custodian of this important heritage, she bequeathed all her work and moved to the West Indies. In Martinique, she composed a hymn for 40 choristers and designed the Marianne of the overseas territories acquired by the President of the French Republic. She was even summoned to the Elysée Palace! In 1992, she finally discovered Saint-Barth and settled there for good. Kay became an internationally recognized painter and began to sell all over the world: Australia, United States, Germany, etc. Her lifestyle changed. She also opened one of the island’s first galleries: “L’Espace 21” in Gustavia’s Carré d’Or. A pioneer, she contacted the world’s leading auction houses and brought in works by Armand, Picasso, Leonor Fini and César, whom she met personally. She organized the first auction on the island! All her adventures and encounters influenced and modified her way of painting. She successively went through several periods: naive, pointillist, realist, figurative-abstraction, before finally finding her own style: “Between Art and Science”. She immersed herself in her work, sold her gallery and began an ambitious creative process. Many other painters might have lost their way back then, in an obtuse or inclined mystical spirit. Not Kay! The information presented itself and devoured her. She seeks to understand. Her answer was Cartesian! After an extraordinary encounter with astrophysicist Panayotis Charitos (CERN), she threw herself into the study of the infinitely large and the infinitely small. In search of the link between us and the universe, through astrophysical information: Bosons, neutrinos, particles, black holes, gravitational waves, Planck’s wall, quantum mechanics, double causality, space and time, everything! She even met the team at CERN, the gigantic Franco-Swiss particle gas pedal. Her ultimate goal: to transcribe the movement of elementary particles between inspiration and mathematics through her artistic creations, and to share the link that exists between Consciousness and the Universe in order to discover who we really are. She has filed an international patent for her latest creation: “Walls of Light”, which define the multi-dimensions of Being within us.
This “Wall of Light” was inaugurated on February 17, 2017 in front of the courtyard of the Collectivité de Saint-Barth’.
The Collectivité de Saint-Barthélemy organized its “Retrospective” between “Art and Science” at the Musée de Saint-Barthélemy from February 17 to March 17, 2019 with a French physicist Mr. Philippe Guillemant.

Kay Quattrocchi is a painting UFO, an extraterrestrial. And if you want to have a good time, be sure to take a look at her paintings, or better still! Visit his studio. But be warned, her time scale is not the same as yours…”