"Sur la Trace des Versants Ouest" is a series of nine paintings inspired byTraces of the Western Slopes, a composition written by Rickie Lee Jones and Sal Bernardi in 1981, a track released in Pirates, Rickie Lee Jones' second album (Pirates - 1981).

A sensory stroll by the Western Slopes, the foothills of California and the last vestiges of the Rockies that, before they would sank slowly into the Pacific Ocean, adorn Los Angeles with a thousand reflections, adding the glittering of the stars to the shimmering of the city. A poem of a wandering, throughout a city where hobos once were angels... Some fugitive evocations of Rickie Lee Jones, the immense American musician, composer and performer, a figure lost in the so particular landscapes of the West Coast megalopolis, with their endless boulevards and shining streets, its freeways and invasive intersections –the latter symbolizing, in that series' paintings, the souls and the bodies that mingle once in time and then inevitably bifurcate and separate –a fate that all human encounters end by meeting sometime, ineluctably. A reoccurring theme in Rickie Lee Jones' œuvre.

"Traces of the Western Slopes" is a fragmented, multi-directional piece of music, at the crossroads of many genres -Rock, Blues, Jazz. It is a kind of musical, atmospheric wandering, quite sophisticated in its construction, like some hobo-of-the-heart's trip through the contrasted shadows and the artificial lights of the Western Slopes, concurrently violent and fragile, ample and syncopated, whispered and screamed, symphonic and brutal, very powerful, silky, smooth and sharp. A composition in the shape of a puzzle. I tried to make paintings that
would look like this music. "