Workshop
My workshop is my cocoon, my refuge. A solitary and intimate place where I can let my thoughts run free, allow my ideas to wander and where each of my senses are stimulated.
The smell is immediately striking when you enter. A real Proustian moment, which takes me back to my childhood, to my parents’ ceramics workshop.
Next, the floor itself is a painting: it reflects the journey of my work and my experiences, preserving the imprint, like a palimpsest. From the window, I can see the surrounding greenery, I can make out the movement of the wind in the pine trees. I am inspired by its speed, the mark left on the plants as if it were a woman’s hair, with a contrast of light.
Music also constantly accompanies me in my work. A melody can give me energy and guide me throughout the creation of a work of art. It can make me dream, give in to images, memories… By listening to an Albinoni concerto, I can allow myself to be overwhelmed by the emotion, feel the suffering, let it grow inside of me and then appreciate being alive and let my painter’s stroke run free. But I can also capture the energy of a rock song, and give way to a gentle inspiration like air, that is full of energy and almost militant.
WORKING WITH MATERIALS, EXPLORATION OF TECHNIQUES
THE DUALITY OF CHARCOAL
A wily and difficult material, remorse isn’t possible with charcoal. You can’t erase it; every gesture is a risk and needs to be a success.
Black and white contrast with one another; the charcoal leaves marks and requires the artist to excel to master the tool. Pleasure emerges when I let myself be lulled by the sound of charcoal on paper. An intimate sound for a sensitive material that I like working with using my fingers as it extends my sense of touch. I cover my canvas with paper for a powdery effect, like skin. The paper is like skin that I can caress.
“LIQUIDS ARE YOUR ENERGY” (JOSÉ PIRES)
I don’t use spray-paints in the same way as a graffiti artist, but rather for drips and projections. I like it when it’s liquid: I dilute my paints, I make juices, mixtures, decoctions, to project them, in the continuity of a gesture, an artistic choreography.
CHILDHOOD STENCILS
Like returning to childhood, I use stencils, inspired by ceramicists. You can find them in my paintings with shimmering colours as well as in the most recent series, where certain patterns are repeated in a freer design: open, closed… The painting is never really completely finished.
HYPER-REALISM
Rewriting the aesthetics of the body to attain the perfection of hyper-realism is an obsession. Whether it is through charcoal, with which you can achieve the illusion of a photo, or with paint, the drawing progressively gains volume, and, in the end, a character gradually comes to life before me. Those who inspired me to draw them become bodies. In this almost mystical moment, I feel like a smuggler, discovering a woman who reveals herself in front of my eyes, and through whom I feel myself exist.
Oddly, it is at this moment that the Grail could be reached, where a gap between reality and my painting breaks the illusion of hyper-realism: with one stroke, I erase a part of my work, as if I wanted to allow extreme difficulty to be perceived, by altering its perfection.
Curieusement, c’est à ce moment où le Graal pourrait être atteint, qu’un écart entre la réalité et ma peinture vient briser l’illusion de l’hyper-réalisme : d’un geste j’efface une partie de mon travail, comme si je voulais, en altérant sa perfection, en faire aussi percevoir l’extrême difficulté.