Two years ago, thanks to Jose Villalobos, this site showcasing my paintings was born. I am pleased to see that interest in my works is growing, reaching between 350 and 550 visits per day.

Since I have received this comment multiple times, I would like to remind everyone that the photographs of the paintings presented here cannot capture the light and material effects that bring the painting to life. One might try to imagine the vibration of the color touches by zooming in on the image, but a photo will never convey the living uniqueness of the painting. If you wish to follow my work, please subscribe to the newsletter.

  • Ce fameux magicien 

    huile sur toile, 100 x 100 cm. Prix2500€ + envoi

    ecce homo

    I am asked what the one meter by one meter oil on canvas titled “This Famous Magician” means. 

    “This Famous Magician” was born from a conversation overheard between two young people, one of whom, impressed by a pair of “collector” sports shoes sold for 6000 euros, claimed that he would buy them if he had the money, assuring that he would obviously wear them very carefully.

    read more…

  • False Trail

    huile sur toile, 90×116 cm

    Those men who aspire to go to Mars should take a walk in the forest. There, they would discover that they are already Martians—that they do not know the Earth they so despise. They no longer see it. They are impatient to escape life, caught in the technological illusion of a world forcibly reduced to code effects. A world without scent, without flavor, other than those of human secretions and the formaldehyde of their machines.

    The forest, however, cannot be coded; it is secret, it smells of life and of death, which is called humus. The Martians have forgotten its mushroom paths, which, as Martin Heidegger once said, lead nowhere.

  • Disappearance

    huile sur toile, 100×100 cm

    A painting is a surface for meditation. It seems to me that, unlike the mandala, which supports and channels meditation through abstraction toward unity (the mental clarity of pure presence beyond desire, the Nothingness of all things, all meanings), the painting invites meditation through the concretization of diversity (the forest being a paradigm) toward the experience of a purely sensory, ineffable unity where presence and absence merge, releasing desire.

    A painting is to be looked at, felt, listened to, touched, tasted. René Daumal, a devoted reader of the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita, wrote in Counter-Heaven: Non is my name, non non the name, non non the non. That is the mandala. For the painting, one would have to say: Yes is the ear, yes yes the ear, yes yes the yes.

    The forest will outlive us.

  • Forêt

    huile sur toile, 89×116 cm

    Five against one is not a fair match. But the fox is clever.

  • Portrait of the Artist as a Forest Spirit

    huile sur toile, 100×100 cm

    Our powerlessness in the face of the incompetence, arrogance, and cowardice of our professional politicians regarding the climate emergency leads us to call upon the spirits of the forest. For the spirits of the forest know how to enter dreams and sow humility and rebellion there.

  • War

    huile sur toile, 100x100cm

    no comment

  • The Doe in the Woods

    huile sur toile, 100×50 cm

    In painting, the image of a doe in the woods has represented the epitome of bad taste for at least a century. Framed above the sideboard, whether an original or a reproduction, a bit yellowed—one could almost eat it up… Flea markets and yard sales are full of them. During a visit to the Salon, while standing in front of a painting depicting a pair of deer in the woods, Degas remarked, “A nice spot to take a piss!…” Alas, whether they’re pissing or not, who can deny the delight of encountering a young roe deer in the forest? And to hell with Degas, I had fun painting it. But I couldn’t ignore the fence.

  •  
    The Dance of the Bats

    huile sur toile, 100×100 cm

    With the ongoing shift in our understanding of nature, prompted by the imminent threat of its sterilization and the growing awareness of the accelerated disappearance of many species, the symbolism traditionally attached to various animals in different cultures is gradually dissolving. Goya’s nightmare bats now protect us from the invasion of mosquitoes and other insects. On the lake in my village, as dusk falls, you can witness the bats leading the dance…

  • Being-in-the-world

    huile sur toile 80×80 cm

    How can we view “nature” without reducing it to something in front of us, an object ultimately at the subject’s disposal? How can we paint a landscape without making it the inert reference of a representation (whether it be impressionist, expressionist, or any other style)? I asked myself this question during my previous painting: on the banks of the Volp. To paint the landscape while being immersed in it, and not from the exteriority of a subject facing its object… With this painting, the question becomes: how to paint the living? To paint the living without reducing it to a mere “being,” a thing… Take, for example, a dove. Existential philosophy considers that only humans are beings-in-the-world. Alone in the midst of entities that supposedly do not have a world of their own. But if no living being is separable from the whole of life that composes what we still, for lack of a better term, call nature, then can’t we think that every living being is being-in-the-world ? This may be where respect begins.

  • On the banks of the Volp

    huile sur toile, 116 x 89 cm

    My garden is on the banks of the Volp. A river or a torrent, depending on its mood and the rainfall, almost a stream in the height of summer, the Volp has nevertheless carved out its valley. My garden runs along its left bank, and sometimes I stretch a hammock between two cherry plum trees. The sky is in the water, and so is the bank. The fish, chubs and sofies, slipping incognito under the reflections, make ripples as they gobble up water spiders: that is what I see.

  • Le penseur

    huile sur toile, 100×100 cm

    In the chilly night of the Western Sahara, descending from the people of the “free men” (Amazigh), for whom the word “border” holds no meaning, this thinker, now a guide for tourists from Europe and beyond seeking desert emotions, surrenders to the contemplation of the fire after serving mint tea to his clients. We are far from Rodin’s heroic (perhaps somewhat constipated?) thinker… But maybe it’s time to move beyond heroes, even in thought? Thought is a poor man’s revenge, said Jacques Rigaux, aiming at the head with the boxing gloves of Arthur Cravan… And what if thinking were nothing but an assent, not to power, but to the incalculable beauty of fire? Heraclitus, for ever.

  • An Andalusian Night

    huile sur toile, 100×100 cm

    In the fluorescent light of a hotel room illuminated by the green water of the fountains in the Plaza del Triunfo in Granada, at the foot of the Albaicín where we had gone to watch the sunset to the sound of flamenco guitars played by a small group of young aficionados discovered around the corner of a white alley on one of those tiny garden terraces overlooking the Catholic city, I loved you to the point of tears, beautiful green night of Andalusia!

  • Zone humide

    huile sur toile, 89×116 cm

    It’s a corner of greenery where a river flows. Herons laze or fish for minnows there. Neckties on feet dream of highways. Four lanes of concrete against the squirrels and helmets without feathers to sing the song of progress. Apparently, that’s the only way: destroy the landscape to get there faster. Where?

  • Portrait de l’artiste au féminin

    huile sur toile, 100x100cm

    As much as I understand the interest in gender studies from America, since they allow us to identify figures of domination through socio-cultural systems and codes, I am impervious to gender (and Queer) theories and the identity tensions they promote. Am I “cisgender,” L, G, B, T, I, or + (if you like)? It’s not the identity that matters to me but the respect for the person. I am a woman and a man, like everyone. Jung had some insights, I believe, on this topic…

  • Les saltimbanques

    huile sur toile, 100×100 cm

    I saw the invisible man in Madrid, a stone’s throw from the Prado, the other on video in London. They met in this painting, to the rhythm of a Bach suite. At the confluence of the real and the imaginary, the figurative space opens. Like an entertainer, the artist works with fascination. A successful painting, for me, captures the gaze by confronting it with the improbable presence, irreducible to the simple play of cause and effect. Surface and depth, color has the power to generate form at the boundary between the self and the world, where humans share the constitutive enigma of desire. Winnicott knew something about this… A small piece for the entertainers?

  • In the garden

    huile sur toile, 116×89 cm

    “I’m trying to see the landscape. Besides Leonardo, the Renaissance and classical painting approached it from the perspective of form, somewhat like the gaze of a Greek statue. Impressionism approached it through light. Expressionism through emotional disfiguration. Modern art with the gaze of the city dweller and their distant vision in masses. Cézanne and De Staël painted splendid modern landscapes. Balthus, in his Italian landscapes, attempted to reconcile modern and classical visions. That of professional landscape painters calculates more than it sees. What’s ours? I don’t know. Here, in the garden, we oscillate between photographic striptease, luminous impression, the desire for form, and the premonition of its dislocation. Between the body of the landscape and the landscape of the body.” 

  • Venice on tour

    huile sur toile, 90×116 cm

    To see or not to see, that is the question :

  • Paysage/GPS

    huile sur toile, 50×150 cm

    The goal of figurative art is not to duplicate reality in its entirety but to capture spatio-temporal values, that is, selective values corresponding to the common memory of a certain group and the capacity of that group to intervene in the physical and human order that surrounds it.” – Pierre Francastel in “L’image, la vision et l’imagination.” Our satellites see everything but will never see a landscape. GPS (Global Positioning System) programs our transits, but the landscape does not transit; it changes from one moment to the next from the same point or another. Satellites are indeed blind in guiding us.

  • The rosy crucifixion

    huile sur toile, 100×100 cm

    “I started this painting 4 years ago, and while I published it at the time (see the painting ‘Sign of Life’), I never exhibited it because, stored away in the depths of the studio, it waited for me to understand it in order to finish it. The evolution of my work and my constant reflection on the relationship between figure and background have allowed me to complete it today. The rosy crucifixion is the title of Henry Miller’s superb trilogy of novels. Rose, it is surely that of desire and that of the gaze oscillating between axes…

  • Ana

    huile sur toile, 100x80cm

    Ana Nebaskova is a gymnast. I met her on the internet where, for a few pennies perhaps, she agreed to perform her routines completely nude. But in reality, Ana does not exist. She is only a sign, a pure sign, which insists more than it exists, like the object of desire, like Rodin’s messengers of the gods, like some of Picasso’s nudes. For the body, when it becomes entirely a sign, even to the point of obscenity (as Georges Bataille and Henry Miller demonstrated), is nothing but spirit.

  • The Laws of Hospitality

    huile sur toile, 116 x 89 cm

    The sea is not just a swimming pool, nor an aquarium, but also a wall and sometimes a tomb. The young man from Frontex, the European border police, here on duty, may not be entirely convinced of the legitimacy of his role in the eyes of the children. Where one arm of authority was enough, he puts in both and freezes in his pose… Pierre Klossowski spoke of ‘gestural solecism’ to designate a gesture that signifies an emotion and its opposite: are not the two outstretched arms also those that reach out to embrace? ‘The Laws of Hospitality’ is the title of a literary triptych written by none other than the older brother of the painter Balthus

  • Marcel Duchamp at fine art store

    huile sur toile, 116 x 89 cm

    Marcel Duchamp, the mentor, the prophet, the reference of official contemporary art. Marcel Duchamp, the dialectician, the punster, the worldly humorist, the great Director at the tribunal of the Hegelian Concept, the ironic one who reduced the work of Art to the performative act of the Artist finally becoming the triumphant ego distributing the grace of the ready-made… At the end of the fifteenth century, the paragone debate opposed painting and sculpture; in the twenty-first, painting is confronted with the plastic art of performance and concept. But its advantage, as exposed here, is to show the process of creation, which the performative installation, in its pretension to be nothing but this very process, obscures. Hail Marcel!

  • David and Goliath

    huile sur toile, 114×146 cm

    Returning from Venice where several visits to the Accademia allowed me to understand the value of the theatrical paradigm in Renaissance figuration – particularly in front of Tintoretto’s “The Abduction of the Body of Saint Mark” – I have endeavored here to capture the specificity of contemporary figurative staging. The modern fantasy of an exit from representation was undoubtedly, and still is for a part of contemporary art, only the ultimate manifestation of the illusion of a beyond of the world (of its theater, its film, or its series…) that today’s technoscience inherited from a flattened and moribund Christianity. Here, today, David is a woman who will truly conquer only by breaking free from the system of this Goliath who takes testosterone for a elixir of legitimacy.

  • The bilboquet

    huile sur toile, 100x100cm

    Reality is a question posed by painting. Far beyond mere imitation, pictorial figuration is a language of signs, but without a dictionary. It tracks the visible from recognized signs (resemblance) to attempt to lead the gaze towards the untranslatable, unlisted sign, through which reality suddenly appears in its presence. These two young women silently speak the language of signs. They invite us to look at what cannot be said: the mystery. They must be muses of painting!… Thanks to the visionary painter Martial Raysse for confirming me in my path through his reflection.

  • The other same : portrait of Guillaume Selosse

    huile sur toile, 100 x 100 cm

    Transmission is one of the most difficult acts in a parent’s life. For if they are possessions, they are above all values, and undoubtedly the value of the freedom to pursue an accomplished work in identity and difference. For the Champagne domain of Jacques Selosse, so prestigious and unique, transmission is successful. Guillaume Selosse has inherited know-how, thought, and ambition that his character, perhaps less anxious than that of his admirable father Anselme, assembles with beautiful serenity. At least that’s how I perceive it in this quiet presence, whose features I hope I have captured.

  • Street dance

    huile sur toile, 162 x 114 cm

    Upon discovering this painting, the singer Suzanne Belaubre made this remark: the figurative/abstract dichotomy is not relevant. I believe her. The abstraction of the moderns may well be a subjectivist avatar of figuration. Isn’t all painting always partly an expression of the “interiority” of the painting subject? For every composition is abstract in formal and technical terms, and figurative in its reference to the reality of the motif or the painter’s states of mind. Dance is one of the recurring motifs of the pictorial tradition, from the Renaissance bacchanals to Matisse’s dance, passing through Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, etc.

  • A good reason

    huile sur toile, 60×50 cm, coll. particulière

    Painting a “still life,” that’s a good reason to open a bottle of Selosse. And if I trust my taste buds, this nature is not dead at all! I’m not usually a big Champagne drinker, but a Selosse wine is never ordinary and it’s already a work of art…

  • W.E.F. Davos

    huile sur toile, 90×116 cm

    “How can we deem a modernization project ‘realistic’ when it has ‘forgotten’ for two centuries to anticipate the reactions of the terrestrial globe to human actions? How can we accept that economic theories, incapable of integrating the scarcity of resources into their calculations, are considered ‘objective’ when their purpose was precisely to predict depletion? How can we speak of ‘efficiency’ regarding technical systems that have failed to incorporate into their plans anything to last more than a few decades? How can we call a civilization’s ideal ‘rationalist’ when it is guilty of a forecasting error so monumental that it prevents parents from leaving a inhabited world to their children?” Bruno Latour “Where to Land? P86

  • The elegant, portrait of Rosy B.

    huile sur toile, 100x100cm

    Rosy, my niece, is always of incomparable elegance. Even to the point of exuberance. Her knowledge of adornments orchestrates the play of her metamorphoses, every day, according to the weather and mood. Always somewhat of a princess, obviously… I was asked to explain my way of ‘working’. I draw very little, that may come back someday, but I see in painting. I capture the model (the prey) with a small pocket camera, impromptu, during a meeting. The photos are usually blurry because they are improvised and poorly lit for a basic lens, but it doesn’t matter much. I then ‘redraw’ the image on the computer. I look for the base image that sets the direction for where I will paint. I make a printout in 21×29.7 at the printer, which I place on a stand. Then begins the quest for presence with my hand, my memory, and my desire. The essence lies in the relationship to the background. The question of resemblance, for me, plays out there, between the hand and the memory, under the scrutiny of light. The background is born from the brush, as the photographic image has given way to painting, to pictorial interpretation. The painting is finished when the model recognizes me, who often does not recognize themselves.”

  • The visionary, portrait of Valentine H. de Ganay

    huile sur toile, 100×100 cm

    “Feeding Paris. It’s still a formula, of course. Almost a joke, it’s so pretentious, I realize that well. But a direction must be given. Anyway, if I don’t tell a story at the same time or before or after, I can’t do anything. And especially during this time I spend in the fields, in the vegetable garden, or at my desk dealing with the affairs of the fields or the garden, I don’t write anymore…” Co-owner of the Courances estate where she was born, Valentine de Ganay decided over ten years ago to create an organic garden, a CSA (“Les Jardins de Courances”), and gradually transition 500 hectares of the family estate to organic farming and “soil conservation.” Located 50 kilometers from Paris, at the foot of the castle and its water garden, the unique experience in France required and still requires determination and a disregard for political correctness, of which Valentine fortunately has the formula. I tried to capture this exhilarating energy.

  • The artist, portrait of Philippe Pacalet

    huile sur toile, 100 x100 cm

    I knew Philippe Pacalet by reputation… I remember a lunch with a wealthy winemaker from Languedoc who, when I announced my preference for “natural” wines, brought up from his cellar a magnum without a label from a batch vinified without additives. It was his wine but transformed in its suppleness, its flesh, and the freshness of its fruit. He had made this experiment by hiring Philippe Pacalet. In my series of portraits of winemakers, I needed this “artist” whose wines, from numerous plots owned by the Côtes de Nuits and Beaune that he manages and vinifies for himself, exalt the natural beauty of Burgundy’s terroirs. My friend Roberto Petronio, collaborator of the Revue des Vins de France, had me taste them, and he organized a meeting at Philippe’s in Beaune. In the kitchen of his apartment where his Brazilian wife offered us dinner, I took a few photos and Roberto, better equipped, took some more assured ones. Armed with these shots and the memory of the tasting in the cellar that initiated this delightful evening, I attempted this portrait of a man whom I probably don’t know well enough to capture all facets, but of whom I believe I caught a glimpse of his presence.

  • The freshness of Cheverny, portrait of Hervé Villemade

    huile sur toile, 100×100 cm Prix2000€ + envoi

    For me, Hervé Villemade is one of those winemakers who have restored to wine its natural beauty, its terroir complexity, and its fruit freshness. The respectful management of the vineyard, without synthetic products, and his winemaking techniques (including the use of amphoras) make even the humblest of his wines a delight for the palate, a sweetness for digestion, and a celebration for sharing. Cheers!

  • Three onions and a paint brush

    huile sur toile, 40×60 cm Prix800€ + envoi

    I started by painting these three onions. The painting didn’t stand up. Because the motif is not enough, nor what is wrongly called imitation. It’s the painting that commands. So I added the brush. That’s what makes it stand. Because it’s the brush that brings the painting space to life.

  • Ô scarole!…

    huile sur toile, 20×20 cm, coll. particulière Prix500€ + envoi

    May Chuck Berry forgive me for this title. I enjoyed half of this salad for lunch, I kept the heart for the studio. Escarole is fragile, you have to be quick before its cascade of leaves collapses. Hopefully, we’ll eat it…

  • An apple

    huile sur toile, 20×20 cm Prix500€ + envoi

    In my small Parisian studio, I dedicate myself to “still lifes.” Tackling an apple after Cézanne is risky, even lost in advance. Nevertheless, one must dare, otherwise there is no art that holds. The painter Carlos Pradal told me, in essence, what he learned from his teacher Bergounian: the essence lies in the emptiness around the object. Obviously, a bit of Carlos’s spirit may have passed into my hand…

  • The little girl and the stone

    huile sur toile, 90×116 cm Prix2500€ + envoi

    The earth does not belong to us, we borrow it from our children…

  • The Rave massacre

    huile sur toile, 130×96 cm

    When victims become executioners and vice versa.

  • Concert de Suzanne Belaubre

    Pour le décrochage de l’exposition du Carla-Bayle, Suzanne viendra donner un concert à la galerie le 29 septembre à 19h. Pour tous ceux qui sont dans les parages, on va se régaler. Entrée libre

  • Triptyque de la Science Politique
    huile sur toiles 90×116 cm, 116×90 cm, 90x116cm

    no comment

  • The gardener, portrait of Valérie H.

    huile sur toile, 100×100 cm coll. particulière

    “A good portrait is not just a portrait in which the faithful representation of a model is proposed: not only must the copy ‘resemble’ the model, but it can only do so by imitating what makes the model resemble only itself, and therefore is inimitable; it is the imitation of the inimitable that makes the quality of a portrait: in other words, resemblance can only be read as difference. If the painting does not represent what is inimitable, the portrait is only a ‘robot portrait’, the painting becomes a ‘genre painting’, representing a certain type of man, etc.” Jean-Marie Pontevia

  • Septembre au Carla-Bayle

    Exposition d’une quarantaine de tableaux

    Depuis l’exposition de la galerie Babel à Paris en 2021, mon travail a considérablement évolué. La chance de disposer de la grande galerie municipale du Carla-Bayle (Espace des Coucarils) durant tout le mois de septembre 2023 me permet de montrer cette évolution à travers 3 séries de tableaux: la série des portraits de femmes que je suis ravi de pouvoir rassembler dans une même salle, la série des “mythologies” qui en occupera une autre et une série que j’ai appelée “à la vie, à la mort” qui réunit des tableaux sensuels et heureux à d’autres plus tragiques, la série de la vie quoi!.. Le Carla Bayle est un village d’artistes, c’est si l’on veut le “Saint-Paul de Vence” de l’Ariège à quelques lieues de Toulouse. D’excellents artistes dont plusieurs de renommée internationale y travaillent et y exposent. Je suis très heureux d’être parmi eux en compagnie du Sculpteur sur métal Michel Sarniguet et de la Céramiste Danièle Coustures. La campagne autour est très belle, les montagnes sont là devant et pour tout ceux qui cherchent leur destination de promenade en septembre, c’est ici qu’il faut venir. Il fera beau j’espère, si ce n’est dehors, au moins dans les tableaux et les sculptures…

  • 3 reported peppers

    huile sur toile, 50×61 cm Prix600€ + envoi

    There are some pretty fiery peppers at the market. I wanted to paint them. I chose them in accordance with the traffic code. Decontextualization in the realization of a still life is a process that, if I’m not mistaken, the seventeenth century knew how to use well. Out of the context of the kitchen, storage, or dining table, fruits or vegetables take on an existential dimension. You only see them, there’s only them to see. In their presence of color and form. The Spaniards knew how to make metaphysics with still lifes. As a Frenchman and therefore a bit mischievous, I gave us the bill, paid contactlessly, please.

  • The surprising, portrait of Justine B.

    huile sur toile, 100x100cm Coll. particulière

    Painting the portrait of someone very close is the most unsettling, difficult, and moving thing. Because the stakes of resemblance are at their peak. Not the resemblance of the selfie, obviously, which is only a mechanical and statistical resemblance (especially since most selfie cameras produce an image from several shots, “correcting” shapes according to a programmed standard), no, the real resemblance, which involves the gaze, and for the painter, manifestly, the gaze and the body (the gesture of the hand). I like the portrait in “medium shot” (as they say in cinema) because the subject’s body is also involved, the stature of the person indicating as much, and sometimes even more, than the features. Because for me, presence is the secret to all resemblance.”

  • Memento Mori

    huile sur toile, 116×89 cm Prix3000€ + envoi

    What the slave said to the victorious Roman general, many of our contemporaries should hear, many of our ultra-rich, our leaders, our scientists, our technocrats, and all those transhumanists who hope to cheat death by indulging in the illusions of power and the machine: memento mori! I conceived this painting above all as a tribute to Andrea Mantegna. Facing reality was his strength, the fifteenth century admired it. We have much to learn today with our increasingly disconnected images and lives. Facing reality, not for the prowess of imitation, copying, or some kind of trompe-l’oeil, no, but because it alone is beautiful with all its tragedy and joy. There is no other. Memento mori, for many Romans, before the Church took hold of it, also meant: carpe diem.

  • the bookseller, portrait of Laure S.

    huile sur toile, 100×100 Prix2000€ + envoi

    “Never can one experience, in the creation of a work of art, a feeling of perfect happiness. The act of creation carries the promise that one feels disappearing as the work progresses. For the painter then realizes that he is not painting anything other than a painting. Previously, he had almost hoped that this image would come to life.” Lucian Freud.

  • Anselme Selosse, a Grand of Champagne

    huile sur toile, 100×100 cm

    The other-same, that is his creed. His shadow is all in the vineyard, summer and winter, and he barely leans against the effervescence (from the corner of the wall on his left). Anselme Selosse is a meditative winemaker. His wines do not age, they meditate like him. Because his viticulture is coupled with a living thought in the vineyard and in the cellar right up to the glass. Firstly, there is non-action. Respect and listening to nature, to the other. The years pass and the other-same imposes itself with age. The other-same? The management is the same but the other acts on me, or agitates me if you will. I cannot stand idly by in the face of the world as it is!… I have learned to love it, to listen to it, it must be guided to the best. Start by caring for this Champagne nature so that it gives usits effervescence. Then elevate it to the taste buds to feed the mind. But the other-same, says the father, is also Guillaume, the son… The other-same, for the painter, is’ nt it the principle of figuration?

  • The anthropologist, portrait de Valeria E.

    huile sur toile, 100×100 cm Coll. particulière

    “I am touched by your subjects, but your treatment lacks singularity… What I like about an artist is singularity, what makes him unique and identifiable.” I am told this reflection which I gladly hear and I therefore take the opportunity to remind or clarify the intention that guides my work. The modern era loves singularity and its ostentation, which is fair game since it is the era of the homogenization of individuals, of statistics and anonymity, what Robert Musil called the man without qualities. The motif matters less than the painter’s manner: this is the foundation of figurative or abstract expressionism. And each twists their gaze and hand to make style, uniqueness, and identifiability: the brand, they say in the world of commerce. As far as I’m concerned, subjective singularity does not interest me: it’s the singularity of the painting that interests me. Does it allow me to see the world, beings, the meaning of the present? It is the singularity of the presence of things, beings, life that I seek to paint, not the illusory singularity of the self. The painting is a meeting between me and the subject in the light of the eye and the hand. It is successful when the meaning (life) becomes visible. Technique is at its service.

  • The musician, portrait of Suzanne B.

    huile sur toile, 100×100 cm, Coll Particulière

    Perhaps we should promote a new humanism that no longer relies on the calculative reason born of the Enlightenment. Perhaps we should rethink the famous phrase of Protagoras that modernity has interpreted as an invitation to dominate nature: ‘Man (humankind) is the measure of all things.’ Because this measure may not be geometric or mathematical but rather sensory, sensitive measurement, the measurement of senses and emotions, at play in art and ethics. Therefore, domination is not the right approach…

    Beauty, which may be nothing more than the manifestation of this measure, seemsmore relevant than ever to me. The sublime, that feeling of excessiveness which modernity boasted about, may be nothing more than a mystical and morbid dead end. A person is beautiful when they embody and radiate their own measure; they are only sublime when they are lost.

  • Burn out

    huile sur toile, 146 x 89 cm Prix3000€ + envoi

    I am allergic to neoplasticism and other suprematism… The combination of the three primary colors (unnatural colors, technical colors in fact, defined as ‘primary’ because they enable the production of others) produces a visual shock that paralyzes the mind and body. I used them for the painting ‘New-Orleans AR’ to evoke syncopations. Because these are colors that channel flows, colors of the factory par excellence, colors of abstract order, constraint, and energy manipulation. Mondrian, the painter of management? Alas, we now know where management leads: to burnout. Suddenly, the flesh refuses to bend to the circulation of flows (of information, goods, energy, desires). I had to step well out of my ‘comfort zone,’ as they say in techno-psychological terms, to paint this picture. Ugliness, Goya taught us to face it and try to paint it. I did what I could.

  • the market gardener, portrait of Cia G.

    huile sur toile, 100×100 cm Prix2000€ + envoi

    The term ‘environment’ belongs to the technological vocabulary of green technocrats. They certify to us that we live in the environment and that it must be respected. As if all environments were respectable!… The older notion of ‘milieu,’ borrowed from biology, seems more appropriate, but it implies that we would be in the middle. It is clear today that we are rather on the periphery, right?… The planet, derived from astrophysics, also needs protection. Astrophysicists often have big patriarchal beards. Protecting the planet is a concern of playmobil players. As if we were in orbit!… The old word ‘nature’ is already more interesting because we are not in nature, we are of nature. But what is nature? It is not the world that can deny it, nor the universe that cares… Nature does not exist and will never exist on Mars. Because nature cannot be dominated, transported; it is a fabulous chance to cultivate. Like this green cabbage that Cia grows without chemicals, on the hillside, under blue skies, between Sainte-Croix and Fabas. She sells it at the market. And I put it in the pot-au-fe

  • The Winemaker, portrait of Chrystelle R.

    huile sur toile , 100×100 cm Prix2000€ + envoi

    Louis Dumont, in his ‘Essays on Individualism,’ shows how the modern Western individual results from a historical process initiated by the renunciation of the world of the early Christians, the founding ‘freedom’ of the individual asserting itself in the rejection of worldly life. Through the centuries and the creation of the ‘universal’ Church and its rejection by the Reformation, the individual becomes increasingly involved in the world until, with Calvin, having nothing else, in predestination and the uncertainty of grace, but this world to impose the Kingdom of God through his will and action. This process inevitably leads to the artificialization of the world since nature, natural law, and any other instance beyond the human tend to disappear in favor of the information project and subsequently the mechanization of reality (cf the transhumanist project). The paradox is that the individual, in the name of his health and happiness, finds himself subjected to the machine, gradually stripped of his freedom and therefore on the verge of disappearance. These were my readings as I painted the portrait of this young woman, of those who today resist the sirens of nature domination to listen to it.

  • The photographer, portrait of Céleste L.

    huile sur toile, 100×100 cm Prix2000€ + envoi

    The gaze of the photographer fixes its object while the painter’s gaze envisages it. Celeste sees, she is the ultimate seer, and all her art is to see what there is to see, the scene, the light, and frame it through her lens. The painter rather seeks how to see, for he sees gropingly. He envisages the object (or subject), and his gaze passes through the hand to see. The photographer’s gaze captures, the painter’s gaze pursues (like a ‘follow-spot’ in a music hall) what his hand gives him to see. The painter does not see, he has seen, when the painting is finished, if he has succeeded.

  • The reader, portrait of Joële C.

    huile sur toile, 100x100cm Prix2000€ + envoi

    Each person has their light. The word ‘person’ is richer and truer than the term ‘individual,’ which is too accountant-like and implies collectivity only in addition. The person is something else; it is constituted from the other. That is why one can make a mask of it. The person is constituted by the gaze of the other. The noble savage is only a legal fiction; in truth, there are always already others, as Rousseau well saw. The portraitist, the ultimate viewer, made the restoration of this gaze his challenge. Joële C. was leaving the market when I captured her. She had filled up on books at the bookseller’s stand. Because she is a great reader. The longest part to find in this portrait was the background. I took it five or six times. Because it is from it that the light comes. And each person has their light.

  • The pie thrower, portrait of Marion C.

    huile sur toile, 100×100 cm Prix2000€ + envoi

    Every individual is unique, that’s the humanist postulate. This uniqueness is neither arithmetic nor mathematical nor computerized. Irreducible to the code. It must be repeated, individual coding is anti-humanist. What does this have to do with painting? The question of resemblance. Resemblance is neither duplication nor copy, nor model, nor coding of recognition, but the capture of the unique. Expressionism, stylization, serve resemblance, they do not betray it. The Renaissance painters had seen this well. The moderns have too often forgotten it. I hear: oh, it looks like a photo!… Yes, certainly, if one does not look, if one only recognizes. But painting is not facial recognition. Something is happening there that escapes all recognition, something subtle that modern art believed it could reveal crudely, at the risk of obscenity: the trace of the hand and the body. You don’t recognize the pie thrower? So you can see her.

  • the puppeteer, portrait of Soraya D.

    huile sur toile, 100×100 cm Prix2000€ + envoi

    I decided to make a series of square format portraits. This is the second one. It is about seeing the beauty of a face, a bearing, a carriage, an expression, a gaze, and placing them in a square without succumbing to idealization. The beauty of a presence. The subject is no longer a model; it is an encounter, a reference without referent. How far can painting grasp the truth? That is the only question. The technique must submit to it. As a result, I paint more slowly.

  • Claude’s portrait with QR code

    huile sur toile, 100×100 cm, Coll Particulière

    Humanism probably originated with the representation of facial features. The Renaissance made the portrait the celebration of the individual and of this new freedom of the mind and body. The portrait then brought together around the most vivid possible face the characteristic signs of the character’s identity: the quality of the clothing, accessories, objects, or tools, and even some animals like the splendid ermine of Leonardo’s Lady. Today, as our clothes are ‘casual,’ and external signs of originality are neutralized by fashion effects, our identity is gradually reduced to a coded formula, whether biological or social, with a huge step forward in terms of social codification thanks to epidemic scares. Needless to say, individual coding, whatever the good intentions, is an anti-humanist act. 

    The QR code, which stands for ‘quick response code,’ was developed by a Japanese engineer to track the history and movement of goods. With digital fanaticism and the pandemic, it is now applied to human beings who are now ‘tracked’ like goods. The smartphone being the obligatory portable spy. Today, portrait painting, besides the pleasure it provides at each stage of its execution through the search for the right touch, has something of a reaffirmation of the human.

  • The rape of Europa

    huile sur toile, 90×115 cm Prix3000€ + envoi

    Myths, like oracles, are open to interpretation in all directions. That’s why they are true. The rape of Europa has been a classic subject of painting since the Renaissance. Alongside the mischievous eroticism of the classical treatment slices through the more perverse eros of today. The confiscation of Europe, like the confiscation of desire, is an open question that this painting promotes.

  • The Time of the Titans

    huile sur toile, 115×90 cm Prix3000€ + envoi

    In a sequence from Michelangelo Antonioni’s prophetic film “Red Desert,” a child (the young son of the protagonist played by the very beautiful Monica Vitti) suddenly decides to stop talking. For days and nights, in the silent room and as if deserted by life, amidst his neglected toys, only his robot emits sounds at regular intervals, a derisory machine with a hospital-like tone, now the sole repository of signs of life. It is from this child that this Titan comes. For here comes the time of the Titans (again). Michelangelo saw it well. From which Parnassus will the measure (re)come to us? We will need a serious assembly of gods to overcome them.

  • Lost in translation

    huile sur toile 115×90 cm Prix3000€ + envoi

    That’s the title of a lovely film by Sofia Coppola released in 2003. It referred to the confusion of two Americans lost in Japan. It would fit well with this first quarter of the 21st century which sees itself as the transition to this “new world” where the world serves the machine, the endless circulation, and the illusory technological conquest of the universe. Montaigne, the truthful writer, wrote in his Essays: “The world is a perpetual seesaw, I do not paint being, I paint passage.” He knew that painting thinks. Where is Andromeda?

  • Death of Darrell Standing

    huile sur toile 146×115 cm Prix4000€ + envoi

    Darrell Standing has always been a provocateur. An artist’s heightened sensitivity, a passionate friend of painters, and the character of a Jack London novel. Darrell Standing was a lone wolf. On the eve of his death, the ultimate provocation and message from beyond, he sent me a selfie accompanied by these words: the red button is over, the blue button is the end. Signed Darrell Standing. A final smile flickers on his lips: what a trick he played on me!… It took me a month of haunting to be able to see. He wanted a history painting: here it is. I did what I could. The term historia was what, for Alberti, in the Renaissance, ensured the unity of the painting. Historia only became history as a “collection of events from a life” around the 12th century, if I’m not mistaken. Then the academy made it the narrative of exemplary events that great painting had to depict. Yet Chardin had turned it around with his Ray… A history painting therefore at the request of the late Darrell Standing, my friend. I played on two inverse perspectives and summoned some of the characters who gave all his appearances in my life (he was like that, appearing and disappearing immediately) the material of his novel. This painting was as exhausting to make as it was beneficial. I dedicate it to Pierre Labille.

  • Gourmandise du soir

    huile sur toile, 50×50 cm, coll. Particulière

    Cette nature pas si morte j’espère, est dédiée à feu mon ami Henry Frédéric Roch.

  • Appeard

    huile sur toile, 30×24 cm Coll. de l’artiste

    I painted this little painting almost two years ago. I could have called it “The Glimpsed.” It was at the turn of one of those forest paths that lead nowhere. The autumn light was cool and gentle in the Hautes Côtes de Nuits. True apparitions never cease to appear. Not ceasing, that’s the mystery. Ultimately, we try to touch time with brushes. Sometimes it works, sometimes not… I present this small painting today because it still appears to me.

  • Anne Elligers

    huile sur toile, 100×50 cm Coll. particulière

    During the national holiday, the Norwegian people make a point of parading in traditional national costume. Anne Elligers, my partner’s mother, is never absent. Offering for her birthday, to someone you love and respect, their portrait, carries various risks. Angering a mother-in-law is hardly advisable… Behind Anne Elligers, the Norwegian mountains are purple, and the singular format of this portrait gives the character an iconic stature that pleases me. It is suitable for the solemnity of the celebration. The landscape takes up a fragment of a romantic Norwegian landscape painted by the Norwegian painter Johan Fredrik Eckersberg in the 19th century. The question of the eyes led to a tough negotiation with her daughter. In the absence of the model (as it was a surprise), I sought the gaze under her dictation. The gift was accepted, so I can publish it.

  • Impotence

    huile sur toile, 120×90 cm Prix3000€ + envoi

    “Every authentic myth aims at the reality of the world as a whole. (This is precisely why it cannot be compared to anything rational, but only understood as a synoptic view or archi-phenomenal revelation). Because the myth always grasps the reality of the world as a whole (and therefore being as opposed to things that are), it simultaneously addresses the human being in their entirety, the very being of man… and the attitude that is his in existence.” Walter F Otto

  • The sleeper

    huile sur toile, 120×90 cm, coll. particulière Prix3000€ + envoi

    Shh!… She’s sleeping. I was looking for a light, I found a sleeping woman. Picasso, I believe, teaches us to see shapes. For light, which is not impressionistic, neither sensation nor objective data, light, that is, the one that opens vision, you have to go see Vallotton, Chardin, De la Tour, Leonardo obviously… And then you try, you do your best.

  • Sunrise

    huile sur toile, 120×90 cm, Coll. particulière

    Sunrise on the first day of spring. Ariège is a beautiful country.

  • Strawberries and chocolate

    huile sur toile 50x50cm, Coll. particulière

    This is the title of an excellent Cuban film from the 80s. But as I am a painter at the first degree, I see strawberries and chocolate. A small basket of strawberries like the ones found fresh at the moment, the first of the season. It makes you want to bite into them. Done. And a square of dark chocolate with it, it’s a good contrast, simply natural.

  • The goal of the century

    huile sur toile, 115 x 90 cm Prix3000€ + envoi

    I hope it’s not the only one… The entire duration of the realization of this painting was a difficult moment for me. Funny how life follows the paths of our imagination (and vice versa)… There is certainly a cry here. A passionate cry, fundamentally joyful but also terrifying and sad. The ball game gave rise to human sacrifices in pre-Columbian civilizations. We have undoubtedly inherited something from this. Both an immemorial depth and cruelty, and a perpetual, ecstatic emergence. That bearded devil bursts forth, against the backdrop of this bar which, like all bars, becomes vectors of emotions in the night. Hooper knew it well.

  • A small soup?

    huile sur toile, 40×40 cm Coll. particulière

    It takes effort to grow. For painters as for others. We compose it and we attack the vegetables. They must be seized, they are tastier that way. We stylize or refine them until the peel. Carrots come easily in orange. The white-violet of turnips is tougher, more geographical. The leek is sliced ​​between the surface and the thread. The background carries the light and the materials. Ever since I really looked at Chardin’s paintings, I wanted to do a still life. It’s as if the gaze pacified itself. A philosopher’s pleasure. I will do others.

  • The haircut

    huile sur toile, 60×50 cm Coll. particulière

    The columns will wait… Like a grandee of Spain, I defer to the judgment of a daisy.

  • Paris – New Orleans

    huile sur toile, 90x115cm Prix3000€ + envoi

    On Saint-André des Arts Street in Paris three or four years ago, they played in the gray autumn freshness, the quintessential street music: New Orleans. They lit up the sidewalk. This painting could have been called “The old musicians” since they also play to supplement their very meager retirement. But New Orleans jazz takes all of that into its swing. It’s this swing that I wanted to paint. Did I succeed? In any case, I played with primary colors, like Mondrian and his mechanical “boogie woogie”. Do you hear it, this painting?

  • The tragedienne

    huile sur toile, 100×80 cm, coll. particulière Prix2500€ + envoi

    I painted this painting from a not entirely dry black background. The idea was to search for the light of colors in the darkness, which requires material, paste to overcome or animate the obscure… and also skill because the brushstroke must gain form over the shifting of the black. It’s a way to ski in painting. It was followed by a real enjoyment of the moving contrast which is more akin to theater than to daily life. The art of populating the black is a childhood secret that these tragediennes seem to hold.

  • Fitness

    huile sur toile, 115×80 cm Prix3000€ + envoi

    Living one’s body, image, and performance is no longer done lightly. America invented the word fitness. It requires procedures, coaches, machines, screens, to manage this small meat enterprise that was bequeathed to us at birth without contractual guarantee. This painting, which combines three paintings in one, resembles a meditation on the mysterious relationship between soul and body. Between decorum and obscenity, ritual and calculation, there is only the spirit (in every sense of the word) that can save us.

  • The filmmaker, portrait of Jean Samouillan

    huile sur toile, 115×90, Coll. Particulière

    Commissioning is a perilous exercise since it requires pleasing the client while continuing one’s path as a painter. The portrait, obviously, raises the question of resemblance. A word that has been feared since photography existed. Hyper-realism, which trails behind the photo, generally makes dead paintings. Resemblance without life is nothing. I hope I have captured it. Pépita, the dog, looks at us with one eye, a look that the photo of the painting cannot capture.

  • The pink panties

    huile sur toile, 115×90 cm Prix3500€ + envoi

    Here, obviously, I was looking for an inner space. This implied a composition and a light. Six light sources model this space. The complexity of the composition involves both perspective illusion, the play of lines whose movements are authorized, and the dynamics of colors. The red armchair came in right away, like the blue vest. The pink panties, in the center of the painting and its title, give the spiritual intention. Whether the spirit is in the panties, that’s never certain but it’s a risk to take to see the intimacy. The staircase spirals up to the library that one can guess at the top. The universal is not excluded.

  • TheFarandole

    huile sur toile, 90×115 cm Prix2000€ + envoi

    Initially, the title of this painting was completed by this injunction in parentheses: “Do not touch the children!”. The prospect of injecting gene therapy vaccines into children who had no need for them, risking inducing as yet unknown side effects, revolted me. How could one play like this with the future of children? Their games are more enchanting even if the sky announces stormy tomorrows. The sky took two days to appear on the canvas. I cannot say if the relief of high mountain pasture leads their farandole to a refuge or to the abyss. But the laughter of this little girl, fortunately, mocks it.

  • Resurrection

    huile sur toile, 115×90 cm Prix2500€ + envoi

    I started with a ‘Furious Picasso’, standing, brandishing a chair that he might throw at us. I started with his face, directly, I didn’t want to make a drawing. He looked at me, he didn’t want to throw the chair. He wanted to say something instead, but for that, he had to come back to our world. For what? Probably to turn mud into gold like all painters who take their work seriously do. This mud that speaks in our blood. A brush of blood, not a bath. Ultimately, it’s peace he still wants, the Old Man: a painter, a model, a bed… That’s it.

  • Narciss

    Narciss

    huile sur toile, 100×100 cm

    There was talk of the French astronaut Thomas Pesquet on a training mission at the International Space Station. Like a hero from Walt Disney, he regularly communicated from his celestial perch in the smartphones of the flock below, about his emotions, the beautiful blue planet that must be protected, and the science that relieves us. I wondered if he saw himself up there. Wasn’t he risking seeing the Medusa? Narcissus pursuing his image to the depths of the universal night? That’s enough to justify this painting.

  • Anik and Gilbert

    huile sur toile, 115×90 cm. Coll. particulière

    When my parents discovered this painting, they burst out laughing, saying that I was giving them a first-class burial! It’s true that their exchange of glances, here, as if out of this world in this limitless space, was what I had to manage to paint. I had them pose, I took photos in the courtyard of a sheepfold in the Corbières but the beauty of the stone and the song of the cicadas were not my aim. It was a love story at stake. Contingencies fade away.

  • Among the stones

    huile sur toile, 100×100 cm Prix2500€ + envoi

    This painting was born in two stages after three magnificent days of walking in the mountains above Vielha (Spanish Pyrenees). The contrast of the body and the stone cut by the sun, the sculptural pose, the cliffs, and the blue immensity compose a paradisiacal snapshot that the beautiful blinded woman grimaces at. Sunglasses would be unacceptable.

    Prix2500€ + envoi

  • the clandestine party

    huile sur toile, 80 x 116 cm.  Coll. particulière

    Defying questionable and contested sanitary bans during the covid pandemic, the screening of an excellent film by Jean Samouillan recounting the journey of goats to pasture and the self-organization of a community of shepherds, was an occasion of rare elegance.
    The mountain paths allowed for escape in case of assault by the constabulary. The light was pink, and we ate the goat meat with young wine. In my opinion, this deserved being painted. It is now with a Qi Gong master. 

  • série Les maniaques 

    huile sur toile, neuf fois 61 x 50 cm.  Prix60000€ + envoi

    work in progress 

    Au départ, il devait y en avoir douze. Les trois autres viendront peut-être si la série n’est pas partie avant. Chaque portrait est indépendant mais ne peut être ôté de la série qui se présente à l’exposition comme un mur d’écrans. On y reconnaît aisément quelques-uns des milliardaires qui dominent le néo-féodalisme transhumaniste d’aujourd’hui. Tant que la communauté humaine n’aura pas radicalement remplacé la valeur dominante de l’argent, la série restera en cours.

  • Totem 

    huile sur toile, 116 x 89 cm.  Prix2000€ + envoi

    Between horizontal and vertical, there is a nude woman reading. I painted this entirely with a three-centimeter-wide brush. The shadows of the volumes come from large, precise strokes. It requires a gesture that is both extremely free and precise, infused with intention. When it fails, you wipe it away and start again. This was the technique of the painter Carlos Pradal. I learned it by watching him when I was twenty.

  • Les copines

    huile sur toile, 100 x 100 cm. Coll. particulière

     l’heure du pic-nic 

    Ça se passe très certainement dans le Nord de l’Europe. Elles se promènent comme ça aux beaux jours lorsqu’elles reviennent d’une baignade dans le lac. J’ai essayé de peindre cette insolence de la beauté.

  • Painting with wiper for bad days

    huile sur toile, 100×100. Coll particulière

    One can depart from the cliché, but one must not arrive there, as Alfred Hitchcock essentially said. I brush against it here. The windshield wiper saved me: I can see it. Some images are too beautiful to be true. There’s always a major flaw in the dream, or else you wake up. So, this painting might seem terribly rigged, like when you run hopelessly after the tram and end up inside just to finish it. It’s two-bit dreaming, but the foam of the wave sliding onto the sand and the golden body of a beautiful woman, I like that. It appealed to the wife of a friend who wanted it to decorate her new house. Her jealous husband wants a painting of diners. That might just happen…

  • The Pointe Saint-Eustache

    huile sur toile, 100×150 cm Prix4000€ + envoi

    This is one of my finest paintings. One winter day, I passed by the church of Saint-Eustache in Paris in the Halles district. Behind the church is a small door that opens into a sizable room where an association, presumably Catholic, distributes hot coffee to the homeless, as they say. There’s a small barred window on the side that struggles to light up the room, even with a halo. I looked through the window and saw that. The characters came on their own, and their story is far from over.

  • The coronation

    huile sur toile, 100 x 80 cm.  Prix2000€ + envoi

    For a coronation, this is the coronation! Masked by the authority of the Elysée. The Elysée in Paris, not the Greek one, because here the dead do not rest. They are required to answer on television. They talk, they talk through the mouths of experts who make the dead speak. Everyone is afraid. The painting hanging on the wall behind the two figures is called Paris. It’s a pigeon flower. I sold it at the Babel gallery exhibition. The two figures form a couple in life as in fairy tales. The pandemic tale that masks them is likely to give them the blues. Yet there is air and sunshine outside. Fortunately, a scarab has entered, which, as everyone knows, is an Egyptian symbol. I painted this with a good speed that affirms the strokes and brings out the forms.

  • The déjeuner sur l’herbe

    huile sur toile, 100×150 cm, coll. particulière Prix3500€ + envoi

    My admiration for Manet’s work is undeniable. Like him, I believe that one of the major dimensions of painting is revealed to us by Velasquez. We know Manet’s taste for a certain provocation. In this game, I humbly pay homage to him with this luncheon on the grass where it is the men who are naked and a woman who looks. Hence the subtitle. Painting the light and the reflections of the river was a great pleasure. The photo of the painting is poor; the color is veiled on the right. I will redo it, I promise.

    I painted this canvas in memory of those moments of exhaustion and pleasure we experienced, my nephew whom I had hired, a former student who became a friend who came to help us, and I, when we were building another floor on my house in the middle of August under a scorching sun. Around noon, when the heat became unbearable, burning, dirty, and sweaty, we would throw ourselves naked into the cool water of the Volp, the stream dominated by my house. The light was so beautiful that I took a photo to mark the scene. Two years later, this painting was born. A rather imposing format allows easy entry into the undergrowth. I painted under the trees, coming to life with the tip of the brush or the bristle of the brush. I was in it. I found the scene again with its warm freshness of shaded water, its quiet voluptuousness of being naked, its conviviality of Eden. And I added my partner’s gaze through the sudden pictorial incarnation of her legs. Did she take the photo? No. Yet she watches.

  • Fleur bleue 

    huile sur toile, 40 x 40 cm. Coll. particulière

    love is a drug 

    The scene unfolded one afternoon in a room on the Côte de Nuits. The pose was academic, attested by a sparrow. In the folds of the sheets, there was the sea, the clouds, the waterfalls, and in the middle, a white fairy like a sign.

  • The great debate

    huile sur toile, 195 x 114 cm. Coll. particulière

    Regarding resemblance, I am faithful to a photo by the reporter Mathias Zwick, published in the Catholic newspaper La Croix during the Yellow Vests episode. The contrast of materials between the feverish skin of the horses, the metal of the van, the reflections of the helmets, and those of the fire on the wet road; the fan-like composition descending from the eye emphasized by the mascara of the central rider; the incongruity of the yellow mask emerging from the background on the bottom left like a stamp or embedding like a projection; all of this required millimeter precision of gesture. Not application, but skill. 

  • We’ll see tomorrow

    huile sur toile, 100 x 100 cm. Prix2500€ + envoi

    This painting comes from the central gaze, that of the adolescent. A gaze mixed with mistrust, reproach, and expectation. This gaze struck me through a photo report published by the Catholic newspaper La Croix. This purple and yellow have the color of the gaze, which is rare. The grenade may have also entered through a pun, but it poses a colorful question that makes it possible for everything not to be set in stone.

  • I am Joconde

    huile sur toile, 50 x 100 cm. Coll particulière

    “When, by prefectural decree, we were confused, confiscated, and confined in expert response to a virus, I decided to start a painting that would take me some time. The journey around my room, I do it with a brush. Unable to paint the Mona Lisa since Leonardo da Vinci has already done it, I had to paint what she sees. I slipped into the skin of the famous smile (which is not lacking in a hint of skeptical irony) and I looked. Here’s what I saw. The real difficulty was painting The Wedding at Cana. Paul Veronese must have also experienced a confinement because he put as many people in these Wedding festivities as in front of the Mona Lisa. All these little characters who are looking, leaning, or climbing the curtains, Paul had a good time. It seems that he had stipulated in the contract for the painting that there would be a maximum number of ‘figures.’ I needed three-haired brushes to find expressions so far in fly specks! It was funny. In the end, this painting, as wide as a panorama, belongs to friends who couldn’t resist living with it.” 

  • Vanity 

    huile sur toile, 195 x 114 cm.  Prix4000€ + envoi

    The Vanity as a pictorial genre appeared in the early 17th century, particularly in Protestant countries. The meditating individual, the “symbolic” objects of knowledge and study, the hourglass, and the enigmatic contrast of the skull feed the mise-en-scène of the presence of death in consciousness. Except for the skull, everything is in the computer today. We give it everything, and we remain as naked as fools in the night. In the background, you can see my village, the ruins of the convent that has just been listed as a historical monument. Fortunately, as an antidote, there are negligently abandoned on the floor, a bustier and panties of Princess Tam Tam that embroider on this situation. 

  • Skyping veduta

    huile sur toile, 50×70 cm Prix1500€ + envoi

    dans le monde des images

    La veduta is this window open to the world, in the background, in the paintings of the Italian Renaissance. Skype is a software for audiovisual communication over the internet. It’s all about the world and the screen. The woman showing her body on the screen is the interlocutor. The partner in the media exchange is the painter seen painting this painting in the control mini-screen at the top right. So, the control screen tells us, if it’s the painter communicating with this superb woman’s trunk, that the whole painting is the screen the painter sees while looking at this woman in front of her window overlooking the rooftops of Paris. But on the control screen, the painting isn’t finished, you can see that very well. The painter is a liar. The figuration, an alibi to show the body of a beautiful naked woman. Moreover, through the window, you can also clearly see a neighbor playing his trumpet to get the woman to turn around! But we caught her before.mme se retourne! Mais nous l’avons saisie avant.

  • Fashion week

    huile sur toile, 114 x 195 cm Prix4000€ + envoi

    When I saw this abandoned clothing store window display in a shopping mall in Limoges, I saw this painting. It required a large format for this carnage without flesh. The composition was a delight of shapes, reflections, bursts, and perspectives. The scene borders on pure abstraction. But the night watchman lighting his cigarette in the background brings to life the silence that follows the cutting up of bodies during the fashion week hubbub. I don’t know why this painting made me think of Francis Picabia.

  • The confined

    huile sur toile, 70 x 50 cm. 

    auto-portrait 

    Self-portrait is a genre in its own right. Because if painting can mystify, that’s where it happens. Who is the painter? The one posing or the one painting? The question arises on a winter day when the weather isn’t conducive to going out. The light dramatizes a kind of boredom. The portable windmill is the accessory of all adventurers since Dulcinea existed. In the background, there’s a part of the painting “La Pointe Saint-Eustache,” this room that welcomes homeless people who don’t even have a home to lock themselves in.

  • Paris 

    huile sur toile, 100 x 100 cm. Coll. particulière

    à Carlos Pradal 

    I was crossing the garden of the Palais Royal in Paris when a flock of pigeons fought over a leftover sandwich abandoned in one of those park garbage cans with a metal corolla stretched over a transparent plastic bag to prevent terrorist attacks. Something like a flower of gray-blue pigeons. The carefully raked ground reflected the light: little or no shadow but birds, each for themselves, to get their share of the cake. Few colors, all in value. Which is quite Parisian, to use a phrase from Vian. In the lower right, on the ground, you can see a billiard chalk. One of those blue chalks used to prepare cue tips. A more scrutinizing glance sees a hint of red and a hint of yellow at the bottom of the trash can: it could well be billiard balls. That’s why this painting greets my late friend, the painter Carlos Pradal. He worked in series. He painted a series of pigeons and another of billiard players. And this little blue chalk, as he taught me, balances the painting.

  • Above Quillan

    huile sur toile, 50 x 70 cm. Coll. particulière

    Early in the morning, on a motorcycle in the summer chill. Coming out of a curve, a sea of clouds and the village of Quillan emerging from the vapors. Impressionist technique for a motorcyclist’s sensation.

  • Baigneuse

    huile sur toile, 100 x 100 cm. Prix2500€ + envoi

    I believe in beauty. It may seem old-fashioned since Art has left beauty to Fashion, but I don’t care. Beauty is glory, shining for no reason. I painted a woman bathing in the sea. This beautiful woman that I see in beauty. But I see her double: one part drawn by the sun, one part painted by the diffraction of the sea. The first required the brush closest to the line, the second required the brush, wide enough, to enter the current. The light is all in bursts. The nude woman is an academic theme. But the academics do not have the monopoly of the legendary fair sex! And besides, it’s been a long time since the academy ceased to exist…

  • Lolita

    huile sur toile, 100 x 80 cm, coll. particulière Prix2000€ + envoi

    aperçue 

    I saw her on the Toulouse-Paris TGV. I later learned that her outfit was that of the “Lolitas” from manga. Moreover, when she was exhibited in Paris, young Japanese people stopped to take her picture. To render the plasticized and conditioned atmosphere of the train, it was necessary to follow the design to the letter by working with fine touches and flat areas. In the reflection of the window, you can guess her Nabokov observing her. Let’s remember that the Russian writer, contrary to the too frequent misconception, never praised this condition.

  • Odalisque 3.0

    huile sur toile, 100×150 cm Prix3000€ + envoi

    When I first took my partner to sunbathe naked on this still “wild” beach, as it is covered by the sea in winter and therefore frequented by tranquility seekers, she would occasionally turn around to make sure no one was watching us. Her body and twisting movement reminded me of the Grande Odalisque. Like her, she twisted to see. Ingres hides her buttocks because she is the one looking. Here it’s not her, but a police drone observing: the 3.0 era is the digital age where nothing should escape the gaze of machines. Is this eye a controller or a voyeur? Spy or libertine? The repression of desire and its sublimation are societal questions. Beauty responds elsewhere, by offering itself to the gaze. No more, no less. Cops and intruders abstain. I quite like the modeling of the sand. 

  • Soldat de fortune 

    huile sur toile, 100 x 80 cm.  Prix1500€ + envoi

    le vent des moulins

     

    Pour moi, c’est une blague expressionniste métaphysique.

  • La randonneuse 

    huile sur toile, 60 x 50 cm. Coll. particulière

    au-dessus de Vielha

    Une randonnée en montagne m’a donné deux tableaux. Celui-ci et “Parmi les pierres”, un nu de plus grand format. Le challenge, c’était la roche et le plaisir manifeste de la randonneuse.

  • La philosophe

    huile sur toile, 80x100cm Prix2000€ + envoi

    I experienced it as a pictorial meditation. Everything is there: the order of the foliage colors, the movement of the rails invaded by vegetation, the splinters of hard and sharp stone, the kind used for houses and graves. The past sinking, the future casting a diffuse light without precisely guiding the present, the philosopher is in suspension. She looks at the moment, like an arrow planted in the ground. Everything is swirling color around her. A joy of laying strokes one over the other to see if rocks appear or leaves or grass… and a midnight-blue flame and a cascade of gold, stretched out with the brush.

  • Cogito

    huile sur toile, 50 x 60 cm. Coll. particulière

    Who am I? This cow spoke to me. She asked me who she was to speak to me. I tried to make her a drawing, but it turned into a painting. As always, I wonder how I could paint like that with a light brush, in no time at all. The technique is quite impressionistic, but the light is stopped by the animal. A cow is solid, it’s a big, heavy body, but I had to find her gaze. Try to paint the gaze of a cow, you’ll see. You shouldn’t like steaks for this! Because the beast is alive. And the flies annoy her!…  

  • Suzanne and Justine

    huile sur toile, 60 x 92 cm. Coll. particulière

    A memory. It required a somewhat impressionistic approach. Few brushstrokes, but with nostalgia helping, it came like that. I gave it to their mother.

  • A night in Périgueux 

    huile sur toile, 30 x 30 cm. Coll. particulière

    instantané 

    I always have a mini camera in my pocket, even when I’m naked. In the bedroom of a cottage in Périgueux where I was spending the night, I saw a woman grabbing the towel to step out of a walk-in shower. The woman bathing is a “classic” subject. The shower, revealed in a glass hideaway, a contemporary fancy. The reflected backlight makes the scene exist. The silhouette of the photographer, intersecting the extended body in the curtain’s reflection, eroticizes the situation. The painting adds the necessary unreality to let desire roam. Realism in painting is probably nothing else.

  • Mikhaïl Bakounine in Nadar’s workshop

    huile sur toile, 80 x 65 cm. Coll personnelle

    Nadar made a portrait of Mikhail Bakunin in his studio, where so many personalities from the Arts and Letters of the nineteenth century passed through. The author of the excellent text “God and the State,” a vagabond of the anarchist revolution, agitator, and activist, spent ten years in the dungeons of the Peter and Paul Fortress to escape and immediately return to the hotspots of Europe where there was some chance of seeing rebellion, the self-organization of the people, and freedom flourish, which, as he understood it, “begins where that of others begins.” This man feared neither life nor death. I like having his portrait at home. 

     

  • The Lovers of Pont Cardinet

    huile sur toile, 100 x 50 cm. Prix1500€ + envoi

    This painting could have been called: “Life is a Novel.” It’s the title of a film by Lelouch, but I was thinking of Léo Malet. Something nocturnal, more or less licit and sudden, like any passion. Painting at night is very pleasant because you paint ghosts. Through the open window onto the summer night, you can barely make out a train passing in the immense trench of the rails leading to Gare Saint-Lazare and, above, the buildings rising towards Montmartre. The entwined couple of lovers, illuminated as if caught in the flash of a flagrant offense, mocks as much seeing as being seen.

  • We will all go to heaven

    huile sur toile, 100 x 100 cm, coll. particulière Prix2500€ + envoi

    les cousins

    David Hockney knew how to paint the pool and that almost metallic color of the water. The little cousins frolicking there create a large flower of foam and shards. I hope this painting is noisy.

  • The steppe wolf 

    huile sur toile, 30 x 24 cm. Coll. particulière

    Pierre Labille, admirateur de Martial Raysse 

    Pierre Labille, an admirer of Martial Raysse Pierre Labille is the childhood friend who organized my first meeting with Martial Raysse. In 2014, a retrospective of this great painter was held at Beaubourg, and I was struck by a monumental painting entitled “The Two Poets.” We see a fragment of this painting in the background. Fascinated, the idea crossed my mind to make a film with Martial Raysse in front of this painting. Two years later, thanks to Pierre, I met him at an exhibition of his drawings, and I bluntly presented him with the idea. I knew he didn’t like being filmed much, but to everyone’s surprise, he agreed. The director of Beaubourg gave me access to the painting kept in the reserves and granted me its use for an entire day in a room lit by daylight. That’s where I shot a 45-minute film that still delights me, as Martial is present in the image and possesses a valuable authority on his work and painting in general: “Martial Raysse in front of the Two Poets.” Later, Pierre gave me two small blank canvases and suggested I paint one for him. That’s this painting. We see Pierre and Martial on the “set” of the shoot, in front of “The Two Poets”… When I showed it to Martial, he exclaimed, “Ah, the steppe wolf!” Hence its title.

  • Signe de vie

    huile sur toile, 100 x 100 cm

    à Werner Herzog

    Deux ans après avoir peint ce tableau, je pense qu’il n’est pas fini. Néanmoins je l’expose car je ne le crois pas raté.

  • Les Onze

    huile sur toile, 115 x 195 cm Prix3500€ + envoi

    History Painting was long considered the noblest genre of painting. In his novel, Pierre Michon evokes the life of the painter who created the immense painting exhibited in the ultimate room of the Louvre behind bulletproof glass. This painting depicts the eleven members of the Committee of Public Safety shortly before the 9 Thermidor, which marks the end of Robespierre’s “reign.” Who commissioned this painting? For what purpose? Michon alternates between the painter and these eleven characters, mostly failed literati, caught in the madness of history like the reader in this novel. They are puppets, the puppets of Terror… I wanted to paint this painting that doesn’t exist. The setting, which is not described in the book, had to be found. I found it in Wajda’s film “Danton,” which masterfully staged the temporary and improvised nature of this historical moment. Based on engravings or paintings from the period, I tried to give these puppets their faces and the expression that corresponded to the image each had of himself and his role in the great revolutionary farce. This painting would have its place in a town hall or a ministry.

  • Morning

    huile sur toile, 30 x 30 cm. Coll. particulière

    19°C, feels like 26°C. As its name suggests, it’s a morning. There was sunshine drying the dew, and a naked man in my room. I sketched him. Everything is in the morning light. It had to fit into a very small square format. That’s done.

  • Among the flowers 

    huile sur toile, 100 x 80 cm.  Prix2500€ + envoi

    For me, figurative painting, unlike photographic representation, always captures the moment after. The model’s pose isn’t frozen and fixed by the snapshot; otherwise, the painting fails, but rather suspended in time. Some photos manage, rarely but that’s where they touch art, to capture not a past but something of the future. When I stand before a beautiful painting, I feel like the event taking place is imminent. 

  • Lucie pose 

    huile sur toile, 100 x 80 cm.  Prix2000€ + envoi

    sur internet 

    Lucie clearly posed. But not for me. Probably for a photographer – I haven’t found the author -, because the light illuminating her strongly resembles that of a flash. It outlines the volume and makes the skin shine. Moreover, if you approach the painting, you can distinguish in the reflection of the camera lens placed on the dresser, the lighting setup, the umbrellas, and the person shooting! In this hotel room reminiscent of those at the Hotel Sevilla in Havana, Lucie showed me this monstrous and splendid body that gives life. 

  • Perspective 

    huile sur toile, 100 x 80 cm.  Prix2000€ + envoi

    This painting was the poster for my first exhibition. Dive and counter-dive are associated with it. What does she see? This naked man shown in the frame? The person looking at the painting? Such a tranquil intimacy of a naked woman brushing her hair and that look that seems to say: you’re still looking at me, or: you haven’t finished being clever!… It’s as you want, a matter of perspective. 

  • La Parisienne 

    huile sur toile, 70 x 50 cm. Coll. particulière

    c’est la faute à Voltaire

    Comme une apparition. Une silhouette diaphane que son manteau trop grand et pesant retient de s’envoler. Une pose de paparazzi et un contraste risqué entre la matérialité de la rue et l’évanescence du visage, la couleur massive des choses et les transparences de la chair, incitent à ressentir la nudité du corps.

  • La Cariatide du Volp

    huile sur toile, 100×50 cm Prix1500€ + envoi

    C’est la Parisienne, nue dans le jardin. Comme la Parisienne, le corps est quasi transparent (la photo le rend mal), comme un reflet de chair dans le jardin plombé de soleil. Dans l’herbe, à ses pieds, le livre “Critique de la Raison Pure” d’Emmanuel Kant accuse le phénomène.

    Chaque tableau définit son point de mire, la distance a priori à laquelle il se donne le plus complètement à voir. Celui-ci se savoure en s’approchant à un mètre.

  • Au dessus des Gollardes

    huile sur toile, 80 x 100 cm. Coll. particulière

    feu Henry-Frédéric Roch, co-propriétaire de la Romanée-Conti, créateur du Domaine Prieuré-Roch.

    Faire le portrait d’un ami défunt n’est pas facile. Surtout quand son souvenir trop jeune n’a pas encore trouvé sa place parmi nos pénates. Une pâleur de mort rôdait dans ce tableau. Je l’ai retouché trois ans après. La vie a repris le dessus. C’est elle qui alimente notre souvenir.

  • La cabriole des Coussoules 

    huile sur toile, 80 x 65 cm.

    baigneuse à sensations… 

    Après une trentaine d’année de digression professionnelle: mon premier tableau. Une joie folle de peindre à nouveau. L’étonnement intense de constater que je le pouvais, sans inhibition d’aucune sorte, pour re-voir. Non que je n’aie vu pendant ces années mais j’avais vu à travers les mots et des poèmes comme “Sept octaves et demi” ou les centaines des séries que sont “Volp” ou “Basilic”… Voir avec l’oeil et la main relève d’un autre métier. La photo n’était plus concurrente mais alliée. L’esprit, plus libre peut-être dans la confrontation au hasard de la matière picturale à travers la touche. Car la peinture exige de toucher pour voir, avec le pinceau ou la brosse, et de la matière visqueuse chargée de pigments. La femme entrant dans l’eau, froide aux fesses, d’une plage de la méditerranée, je l’ai vue d’abord. La puissance du soleil et les remous brillants de l’eau sur ses hanches sculptent son buste comme une statue. Et le bruit du vent est entré sur la toile par le glissement claquant d’un véliplanchiste effectuant un salto.