Painting paradise
‘Gauguin: Voyage to Tahiti’ explores French master’s artistic journey
Like many others, Édouard Deluc is a fan of legendary master painter Paul Gauguin.
The French filmmaker took nearly four years to complete his latest project, “Gauguin: Voyage to Tahiti,” which opens at the Guild Cinema today.
Deluc wanted to do the film after reading Gauguin’s “Noa, Noa,” a travel diary Gauguin wrote after his first trip to Tahiti.
“It’s an adventure of incredible poetry, about the mysteries of creation, the love for distant lands, and the dedication to art. But it’s also a story about love and freedom,” Deluc says in an interview from France. “I discovered the book during my studies at the Beaux-Arts, and it had stayed in my library ever since, like the ghost of a possible film.”
The film follows Gauguin, who was an innovator of modern art, known for experimenting with bold color and distorted proportions, along with his contemporaries Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cézanne.
By 1891, Gauguin is already wellknown in artistic circles but is tired of the so-called civilized world and its political and moral conventions.
Leaving his wife and children behind, he ventures alone to the other end of the world, Tahiti, consumed with a yearning for new inspiration, and ready to sacrifice everything for his quest.
Impoverished and solitary, Gauguin pushes deep into the Tahitian jungle, where he meets Tehura, his muse, who will inspire his most iconic works of art.
Deluc says what fascinated him about Gauguin is that the painter was in the pursuit of a hedonistic dream.
He wanted to get rid of all conventions and reconnect with the wild. He wanted to find his “primitive Eve,” the woman who would distinguish him.
“In 1891, he left Paris for Polynesia,” Deluc says. “He painted there with fury. Sixty-six masterpieces in 18 months. This was the turning point in his work and the arrival of modern art.”
Deluc says the film was shot in Paris and Tahiti in “exactly the same place Gauguin had lived.”
“We tried to make it as authentic as possible in preparation for the film,” he says. “I visited the places where he lived, including the little village. It brought so much history and character together.”