Dead Cat Bounce

“Frederic Cabocel’s Dead Cat Bounce draws it subject from a piece of old film footage in which a businessman emerges from a hospital following a bicycle crash. The gentleman’s attire indicates that he had been enjoying the prestige of a career in finance, but the bandages upon his head and chin (made almost too subtle by the artist’s faithfulness to the monochrome footage and his characteristic texturing of flesh) imply a reversal of fortune that has left him traumatized. His story, though only a single scene is made immemorial here, is a tragedy more profound than any mere traffic accident. The painting’s morose title, though made literal by the faint prints of BOUNCE-branded feline skulls across the oil and silk-screen work, refers to a particular phenomenon in the realm of finance. Following a catastrophic decline in a company’s share price, traders sometimes buy stock at the new low point, forcing the price upwards and opening a narrow window by which to profit one last time before the inevitable collapse. If the title is to be taken as descriptive, then the man’s bandaged wounds will eventually bleed again. His recovery is only a temporary, exploitable setback on the path toward his doom.  Many possible sociopolitical commentaries can be found in the artist’s choice of details: The use of the Franc, the now-archaic currency of France (printed, very much illegally, in its exact original size), might symbolize the loss of self-sovereignty associated with a state’s currency (as franc meant freedom, the original coinage being minted to secure the release of the imprisoned King John II). The archaic bicycle gears might speak to the replaceability of the individual spirit within the complex machineries of corporate banking and finance. The subject’s colorlessness against a background of wealth’s traditional colors may suggest the intrinsic emptiness of materialist pursuits. His handsome visage and refusal to show weakness, however, cast the subject undoubtedly as both protagonist and noble victim.  Thus, Dead Cat Bounce is an homage... Not to the executive whose gilded parachute glittered in the ’08 sky, but to the lower manager who, despite his voiceless loyalty, found himself betrayed and crushed by the very apparatus he toiled to keep in motion. He may still don his suit and tie, too unconscious to cast his trappings away, and he may hold firm in his professional stoicism, but his worried survey of the estranged world that surrounds him betrays his helplessness: Unfairly maligned by the spectating eye and lost in a wreckage of ancient gears, he has been made as worthless as the Francs that flutter behind him. Unlike the cat, this is his one and only life.”

Sinclair Britten Cabocel, June 21, 2019