It takes guts. It's the prison for something wrong.
Then, it's the unconscious and obsessive idea to say it, to express this gnawing emotion. It is a laborious job of research, observations, expectations and patience. The line is the materialization of this hidden and sacred word, buried in me. The line is my release, it is the word I would not say it allows me to express myself, it is my legitimacy and my guide toward understanding existence.
Painting is not a passion, it is a state of emergency and survival, it is an emotional balance.
Thus, I naturally oriented my creation towards the portrait and the human figure. Even outside of my work, I need to read and feed myself through other influences and feel what emerges emotionally, I seek the expressiveness of the line, the look, the posture and the word which comes as close as possible to humans and their abysses.
So I paint my fears, my sufferings but also those that I see and perceive in others, their faces, their postures, their atmospheres.
I am hurt, every day, to observe the horror of a contemporary society in which I live. I do not understand it, its conformism, or its immobility and I do not recognize myself in it. And yet I have to live with it, adapt, so I cry in silence and I paint.
This cry is my unconscious and sacred word. It is a cry of helplessness, it is a cry that is recognized in abandonment and exile, in the loss of love and broken bonds. He is cold, silent and cruel, he tells about the emptiness of the loved one and the loss of identity.
It's a call. This cry is also my rebirth, my hope, my strength, my resilience. I look for truths like so many faces and identities that I miss in a society without ties. "
When I will live. The closer I get to the end, the closer I get to life. It is at the end that one lives by embracing one's entire existence. It is by approaching our own death that we recognize the importance of life.
(April 6, 2022)
I have been working for several years on the human figure, staged, with a certain theatricality. Although acrylic and charcoal are my favorite mediums, I like to experiment on other supports or allow myself to work with materials like scotch, adhesive tape, medical gauze if that feeds and serves my purpose. at the best.
For a few years, I have made the choice of pictorial orientations which highlight the notions of loss, absence, death and their opposites, namely, presence, life, existence. Luck and chance came later in my thinking. More and more I force the deeper expression of the emotional through the body, trying to express all the emotional charge of being. Also, my work has been oriented more towards the outside, towards a global, general, universal idea which calls on everyone to take a position on these questions which in my opinion are fundamental.
The Corpus Series was a starting point for this form of thinking without my real awareness of the change. It was the gaze of the other that helped me.
At the time of designing this series, I had no idea that it could live beyond my immediate surroundings. However, at that time I was too focused on my own loss of the paternal image and it was quite difficult for me to imagine that others could live the same experience with the same intensity. And yet, this is exactly what is happening, we all experience the same things, experience the same social cataclysms, it is The existence of being.
I am not a fatalist. I'm only saying that our lives are alike and that our births, our lives, our deaths impact our sensitivity in the same way. Between these notions, there is the relation of cause and effect, luck, chance, God, or any other element of belief. The events, even experiences lived differently and specific to each, nevertheless remain similar in their universality, each has at home the same photos of birth, marriage, the same collections of memories, even in collective events experienced individually. , collective memory allows each individual to identify and feel as part of a whole. It is the idea that the individual event is experienced by a collective bond. The intimate is a lever with an intention to bind to something larger, community speaking.
The evolution of my approach was not without difficulty because exploring something other than what we are used to is also giving up a part of oneself, a bygone time. Little by little, the erasure of a starting figuration has given way to a freedom of gesture and expressionism of the line. The erasure somehow creates presence.
Reinforcing this pictorial gesture is a freedom that I allow myself.
Yes, my work is oriented towards disappearance, the fact that everything has a limited lifespan. It is not only the idea of death, it is also the notion of absence, of lack. Lack fills the vacant place created by absence. It is also to evoke presence through absence.
In my paintings, I work by removal or erasure, there are sometimes several starting elements which as they advance are found in non-being.
Non-being is what I call this pictorial form necessary in a given time but which cannot go as far as finalization. We could speak of sketches, but I find that it is still different, it is an element of the painting in its own right, a constituent of the framework which allowed the final elaboration. There is also this notion of necessary, indispensable disappearance, a sedimentation. I sometimes repaint a canvas. There is a form of immediacy of the gesture that I claim. Error, clumsiness, failure are part of sedimentation. They are imprints or traces, an accumulation. I only keep what surprises me, destabilizes me, gives me food for thought.
The removal also highlights the remaining material. Here what remains is the essential that I am showing. I add very little, I don't like the superfluous or the too much that suffocates and kills.
I cut the material to keep only a correct outline of the image, to show the little to reveal all its power.
Disappearance is a notion that questions me a lot. What is it that causes presence to live only through its absence? What makes us realize our attachment to a being through the void it creates? Desire something that you have more or never had. The question of death is that too. You die, you are no more, and yet there is this magnificent thing that you can relive by the intention and the memory of the other. Creation is also that. The void denounces the full.
What characterizes my work is being able to create an emotion and that people can identify a link with their intimate. Working on universality means confronting your gaze with that of others on notions that everyone can experience. It is also creating links, it is reviving.
I put everything there. I put there my fears, my doubts, my faults, my repentances, my disappointments, my excuses, my cowardices, my responsibilities, my incapacities and my consequences, my losses, my ignominies, my remorse and my forgiveness, my gains and my capacities, I put everything I feel and deny, everything I see and forget.
I am an animal.
(about the series “A l'épreuve de nos corps” April 20, 2022)
