Artistic approach
The Guiding Thread The figures who populate my work are not our contemporaries, any more than they have a historical meaning at first glance; and in an almost analogical way, my world does not live in action and does not celebrate movement. Here we are immersed in a universe that expresses nothing directly, or more exactly, that has surrendered to a kind of almost immobility, of "slow motion"; for that matter, when painting I do not paint life nor do I bear witness to what I see. It is precisely "here" that my "desire to be" is born and exists. I never surrender my art to reality, but rather project it as a whole into this vital and preserved function of the world, which consists in "being a singular individual". Shaping one's own life, and presiding over the destiny of one's art. The poet and painter Edward Estlin Cummings was particularly enlightening on this subject. "So far as I am concerned, poetry and every other art was, is, and forever will be strictly and distinctly a question of individuality. You've got to come out of the measurable doing universe into the immeasurable house of being." The act of painting is all about a sensual connection with things. The conscience to paint is associated with the vital necessity to paint; indeed, like all passionate people, I devote a truly sacred hatred towards painting. And I wouldn't lie any further by pretending that I love it. There is a kind of dignity (or, if preferred, one may speak of salubrity), in the idea of sometimes despising what we can in no way live without. A painting is no less a prison than it is a gateway to freedom. I complain about it, I rejoice, I shout, I exult, but I always remain hunched over my easel.
Women, eroticism and the painter? Neither my whores, nor my saints, my madonnas, my partners, or even my models (those oblivious ones who pose naked while discussing the weather at that moment or yet to come!) – you won't ever pass them on the street. They aren't artificial, are you insane to think that? No, they are not real, they exist in paint, constantly offering their bodies to the painting. Just as one can suffer imaginary illness. I am an imaginary polygamist. These women belong to me, I am their mother, but just as a mother "is" her child, her daughter in particular, I am not far from being that woman. If there is a diversity of features among them, however, there is also a guiding eye. Some painters deliver you their canvas representing women like pimps on the square vaunting their girls' eagerness to work. Take a good look at my women and see how I don't give them away. Can we speak of eroticism or commercial exploitation? Can they, with the slightest chance of survival, be removed from the canvas on which they live? By no means! They do not take part in the world either. We have "seen", in literature, women leaving the frame to come and lie down in the bed of the painting's owner. Stop nurturing such illusions. If you are hoping for something like that with my women, you will be greatly disappointed. There are flowers that perish as soon as they are picked. They will not take pride of place in your glasses of water. They belong to no one, that is to say they are genuinely free. They are "made" this way.
Learning how to paint I am an autodidact. The autodidact that I am comes deprived of everything, rigorously free of any kind of schooling. My relationship with painting is a passionate one! Throughout my artistic journey, rarely has academism been so scorned. I know nothing and radiate in my great indigence. I am not invested with the noble mission of increasing the spectrum of art. I want to paint, that's it. I was not adopted by the painting world, I show no deference to the "big family", I came into being spontaneously. I don't want to deny that, from sculpture to painting and from painting to another painting, one cannot speak of evolution. However, I only use the word "evolution" after clearly placing it in quotation marks. Yes, painting has evolved, it has grown naturally in the same way that man has evolved, but the artist has not changed his ways! It is the practice and the will to paint that together have diminished the effect of certain academic conventions.
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