Relaxing - Eva Bouzard-Hui, c. 1990

Eva Bouzard-Hui constructs Relaxing as an unusually dense accumulation of motifs, creating a composition in which repose and visual activity coexist. The title suggests stillness, yet almost every portion of the sheet is activated by crayon strokes, overlapping bodies, animals, floral imagery, patterned fabric, vessels, and partially concealed faces. Bouzard-Hui’s idea of relaxation appears not to involve stripping life away, but allowing its disparate components to gather without demanding that they resolve into a logical scene.

The reclining nude at the top establishes the work’s most literal connection to the title. Stretched horizontally across the upper left, the figure lies with a loose, extended posture that contrasts with the compressed verticality below. Bouzard-Hui gives the nude only limited detail. The body is pale, elongated, and partly absorbed into surrounding blue and red marks, making it feel more like commentary on title than a conventional figure study.

This nude also acts almost like a horizon. Its horizontal body separates the upper atmospheric field from the denser forms beneath, creating a visual threshold between open repose and accumulated interior life. Bouzard-Hui frequently allows bodies to become structures within her compositions, and here the nude operates simultaneously as person, landscape, and boundary. Nearby, a small cluster of flowers introduces one of Bouzard-Hui’s most persistent motifs. Roses or rose-like blooms rise delicately against the surrounding blue field, giving tenderness and growth a visual foothold within the otherwise crowded arrangement.

The cat at the upper right intensifies that sense of domestic intimacy. It appears crowned by an explosive orange-yellow headdress or radiating form like the sun. This burst gives the upper center a saint-like quality, while the face itself turns downward toward the lower composition. Bouzard-Hui often uses animals not as accessories but as emotional presences. Cats in her work tend to belong to spaces of closeness, care, and chosen companionship. In Babies to Be, for example, the black cat becomes the emotional focus of an embrace, positioned against a larger meditation on nurture. In Relaxing, the cat again inhabits the human sphere comfortably, as if its presence is simply part of what makes rest possible.

The horse is more surprising. Its form appears partly concealed beneath the large green-orange blanket occupying the center. Whether literally under a blanket or merged into it, the animal is enveloped within the same field that supports the figures. This creates an uncanny but affectionate image: the horse is not outside in a landscape but incorporated into a domestic or psychological interior.

Horses appear elsewhere in Bouzard-Hui’s work as companions rather than heroic symbols. In Horse, Kitty, and Me, the horse is similarly folded into a personal ecology alongside the cat and human figure. That earlier work already shows Bouzard-Hui treating animals as relational beings who share emotional space with people. Relaxing develops that idea further by partially dissolving the horse into fabric, landscape, and body in a state of well... relaxing.

The enormous green-orange blanet is therefore crucial. Its broad surface dominates the composition, creating a zone of shelter into which other figures seem absorbed. Bouzard-Hui repeatedly makes physical structures do psychological work: shields become emotional defenses, pitchers become overflowing selves, and bodies become habitats for other beings. Here, the blanket becomes a whole environment of comfort.

Yet the comfort is not visually quiet. Red, blue, green, yellow, and ochre strokes cover its surface, creating the sensation of fabric charged with memory. Rather than smoothing the space, Bouzard-Hui allows marks to accumulate until the “blanket” feels almost alive. Rest becomes immersion rather than emptiness.

At the right center, the striped vessel is one of the composition’s most distinctive objects. It can be read as a vase, though its rounded, spouted or handle-like silhouette also allows a teapot interpretation. Bouzard-Hui’s interest in ceramics makes this especially suggestive. Given her ceramic practice, including work undertaken alongside her husband, the form can reasonably be seen as a bridge between her works on paper and the functional vessels of her three-dimensional practice.

That connection matters because Bouzard-Hui repeatedly blurs distinctions between body and vessel. In Two for Tea, human beings become cups. In Fullness Complaints, a pitcher literally gives rise to a figure, fish, flowers, and bird. In Flower Sacrifice, a bouquet-like vessel merges with the body itself. A ceramic vessel in Relaxing therefore does not read as neutral still-life furniture. It belongs to a larger symbolic language of containment, care, domesticity, and emotional capacity.

Directly below the vessel, another face emerges. This is one of the work’s most intriguing details because the face appears almost stacked beneath the object, as though person and vessel belong to one vertical hybrid. The face is strongly simplified and divided by patches of blue, yellow, red, and green, producing a mask-like quality. Its expression is difficult to stabilize: contemplative, amused, distant, perhaps slightly melancholy. This is complicated as the forward-facing face splits on the left side to a profile of another face.

The placement suggests that Bouzard-Hui may be thinking less in terms of conventional spatial logic than associative stacking. A vase can sit above a face because both are containers. The vessel contains flowers, water, tea, or emptiness; the face contains thought, memory, and feeling. By placing one above the other, Bouzard-Hui quietly equates object and consciousness.

Flowers reinforce this relationship. The blooms near the vessel and upper figure belong to Bouzard-Hui’s recurring language of tenderness, growth, sacrifice, and transience. In Lifeless Love, flowers bloom despite emotional depletion. In Flower Beyond Your Grasp, the blossom becomes both aspiration and loss. In Flower Sacrifice, it becomes the substance of ritual exchange. Here, the flowers are less tragic. They participate in the atmosphere of domestic abundance.

The composition’s lower right introduces yet another face or figure, dressed in a light garment marked with bright sunburst-like forms. This secondary presence makes the scene feel populated by multiple states of consciousness rather than a single reclining individual. Bouzard-Hui often distributes one emotional situation across several bodies, and Relaxing is no exception. Some figures recline, some observe, some appear as masks, and others emerge from objects or fabric.

This multiplication is essential to understanding the title. Bouzard-Hui’s “relaxing” does not look like isolation. It resembles a mental state in which boundaries loosen. Animals, people, memories, ceramics, flowers, clothing, and landscape are permitted to overlap without needing to be sorted.

Her handling of colored pencil strengthens this effect. Unlike her more translucent watercolor works, the textured crayon marks create a soft but persistent surface. Repeated strokes fill areas without fully concealing the paper beneath. The resulting textures resemble woven fabric, fur, grass, and atmospheric haze at the same time. Material categories blur because the same mark can describe several things.

There is also a strong contrast between the open blue-gray space at the upper left and the saturated green at the right. The figures appear to move between these chromatic zones, reinforcing the sense that the composition is less a literal room than an emotional landscape.

The nude figure, horse, cat, vase, flowers, and human faces can therefore be read as components of a private inventory. Bouzard-Hui assembles the beings and objects that make up a lived environment and allows them to mingle freely. This echoes Horse, Kitty, and Me, where personal animals and human identity already overlap within a shared visual ecology.

The work also anticipates or parallels her recurring fascination with “fullness.” Bouzard-Hui repeatedly imagines the self as something enlarged by what it contains: relationships, animals, objects, memories, flowers, creative activity. In Come Nest on Me, the figure explicitly invites others to gather so that the self may become “fuller.” In Fullness Complaints, abundance becomes almost burdensome. Relaxing occupies a more comfortable position between those states. Its crowdedness feels embraced rather than resisted.

Even the possible teapot contributes to this theme. Tea, ceramics, flowers, domestic animals, fabric, and reclining bodies all belong to the intimate rituals of home. Bouzard-Hui transforms those ordinary elements into a surreal arrangement without stripping them of their familiarity. The strange becomes comforting because it is made from recognizable pieces of daily life.

What appears at first to be a chaotic composition is therefore carefully unified by a central idea: the permeability of the resting self. When the body relaxes, Bouzard-Hui seems to suggest, boundaries soften. The mind drifts, animals move closer, remembered faces appear, objects acquire personalities, and the world becomes temporarily less divided into categories.

Within Bouzard-Hui’s larger practice, Relaxing is particularly revealing because so many of her recurring motifs appear together without being organized around crisis. Birds elsewhere may be trapped, flowers sacrificed, love questioned, and bodies shielded. Here, horse, cat, nude, flowers, vessel, and faces coexist within a gentler psychological register.

The work is still strange, but its strangeness feels hospitable. Bouzard-Hui imagines relaxation as a surrender to one’s accumulated world: to companion animals, domestic rituals, art, memory, other people, and the objects that acquire meaning through use. The composition becomes almost a portrait of inner abundance—a place where everything one loves is allowed to climb under the same blanket.