Interview
Could we first begin by discussing your process? You often start with pre-existing images, which are the starting points for your paintings, even though these images can also disappear completely by the end.
I do not have a systematic method: some images come from things seen or photographs, others are imagined. I do not do photographic paintings because the image does not have more importance than all the abstract capacities of each painting. Photography only serves to materialize things that I do not have in front of me.
I always hope that my paintings can reach a formal level that engenders comprehension, imagination, and echoes, in the same way that a poetic text does through sounds and rhythms, as well as through sensitive or logical relationships between words. I do not conflict the abstract elements with the figurative elements; I see them more as graduations on the same line, which constitute the different parts of the same reality.
You evoke painting as a poetic text, and I know that some writers have impacted you even more than painters. What connection would you make between literature and your work?
Michaux, Kafka or Beckett have all developed particular formulations, narratives that feature characters with changing bodies, into spaces inseparable of these bodies. Their representations of lifestyles, of cerebral architectures, are always closely related to the relationship between perception and activity. Everything that is abstract or that concerns psychology takes a form that is very concrete, external, distanced, and a little cold. Cinema has also influenced me, notably that of Pedro Costa, Wang Bing or Johan van der Keuken, whose connections to fiction and documentary are close to these questions. These are filmmakers who have tried to involve the audience, and do it primarily by working the form, and not in a narrowly demagogic way.
You talked about spaces and bodies, I would like you to come back to these two essential components of your painting. It is often a question of a type of loneliness that is not necessarily tragic but lived inwardly, I remember that you had spoken about your interest for the industrialized places that are a little marginalized, such as the quays, the docks …
Wandering is a method of moving away from a quotidien course. In my recent paintings, I focused on utilitarian places, highlighting their technical or mechanical aspects related to work. These are places that are, in some respects, unsatisfactory, but sharpen vitality, in the same way that a child is captivated by the motor skills of an insect or the power of cars and planes. When I made these paintings, a rhythm gave these spaces a particular form that at the same time flowed from them. Rhythm and colors have a significant capacity for echo and passage in other dimensions, whether historical, poetic, political or physical. These places are an extension of the individual human body, tools that it uses; and in this extension they become social. Realizing that they are there, that they have a scale, produces an effect similar to consulting a map to understand the layout of the place where one is in order to orient oneself. These spaces make possible a type of spatial, physical and cerebral freedom all at once.
As for the figure, it was, a few years ago, the focus of my paintings; but today, the body is indirectly represented. The awareness of a body present in the painting, looking at it, or in slight withdrawal from it is central. Painting is both a sight and an organism in its own right. I consider painting as something that offers what media images, which deny personal experience and do not create active links with the viewer, do not. My experience of art may lie there: to invent images and forms that create something other than discursive, scientific, design or documentary forms. I want to avoid having a unique image of the body, because the body is, through its daily experiences, formed by the ebb and flow of control and letting go. But this happens through the activity of painting, which is a condensed space of the construction of this body.
2016