GLORIOUS GOUDE

Meet “Chicken Man” and “Laurel and Hardy of Bamako,” courtesy of Jean-Paul Goude— visual artist, film director, and image-maker extraordinaire. Behind the disguise above is Parisbased Cuban singer Guy Cuevas, photographed and styled by Goude for the record cover of “The Black Rooster” (a notquite-hit song about a fighting coq who gives up the prize ring for the campagne). The figures at right are familiar to French television viewers as two of the characters in a surrealistic Lee Cooper jeans commercial that has won three Minerves (French Clios) and brought its director back into the avant of the avant-garde. In the forty-five-second commercial, filled with dozens of Goude’s imaginary characters, a grass-skirted Georgette (on the left) jumps up on a trampoline, turns somersaults in the air, and falls into a long chimney. Cut to the bottom of the chimney and out tumbles Fania (the girl on the right), straight into a waiting pair of Lee Cooper jeans. Goude’s days as Grace Jones’s entrepreneurial amour now an ancienne histoire, his plans for the future include turning the girls into a FrancoAfrican poetry-reciting and ballet-dancing cabaret act. Asked about the origins of his inspiration, Goude explained, “I am a member of the Tintin generation.”

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