Warming

huile sur toile, 90×116 cm

The warming of brains is underway. The vertigo of the hyper-speed of algorithmic calculation contributes to it. The golden calf today is called AI. One must choose: allegiance to Automatism and its entourage of industrial exploitation and impulsive disinhibition, or the Recourse to the forests that Ernst Jünger spoke of in his Treatise on the Rebel (1951). For the marriage of reason and madness has been consummated. The Valorous have only the resource of incognito and the forest to recognize themselves and find each other around a reason that is unsubmitted to calculation, the only legitimate queen in the kingdom of impulses.

Concept

huile sur toile, 100×100 cm

“A forest is an ecosystem, relatively extensive, primarily composed of a community of trees, shrubs, and small bushes, as well as all the other species associated with it that live in interaction within this environment. Forests host a great ecological wealth, concentrating 80% of the world’s recorded terrestrial biodiversity. Half of the planet’s forests were destroyed during the 20th century. There is no global governance of forests, nor any international convention.” French Wikipedia

Quadrature

huile sur toile, 90×116 cm

One of the most deleterious errors of our time is the assimilation of brain functioning to that of a computer. The human brain, while it can utilize or submit to some informational system, will never be understandable or viable based on the computer model. Sigmund Freud had already warned us in his time of enthusiastic positivism that the unconscious was an integral, even determining, part of cerebral activity. The irrational is inscribed at the very heart of the use of reason. It is not a great prophecy to affirm that the ongoing takeover of AI over available brains through social media will demonstrate this to us day by day through the multiplication of irrational, impulsive, and morbid acts that call into question the very existence of good social intelligence. A note to neurobiologists: the forest is a more relevant model.

The Green Room

huile sur toile, 100×100 cm

‘Just as the eye responds with “Green” to an assertion that is too long or too intense of “Red,” in the arts, a cure of “truth” always compensates for an excess of fantasy.’ Paul Valéry in ‘Thoughts on Painting.

I am roe deer

huile sur toile, 100×100 cm

Jacob von Uexküll, in his essay ‘Animal Worlds and Human World,’ shows that the forest ‘will not be grasped in its true meaning if we relate it only to ourselves… Its significance is multiplied a hundredfold if we do not limit its relations to the human subject alone but also include the animals.’ For there is no forest as an independent, objectively determined environment. The hunter’s forest is not the painter’s forest nor the roe deer’s. And if I am a roe deer here, it is not to see as the roe deer would, whose perception seems to be limited to blue and green, but rather to pursue the moment that precedes the fiery flash of its leap.”

Where to land?

huile sur toile, 116x 89 cm

“Where to Land?” is the title of an essay by Bruno Latour in which he proposes, in response to the deadlocks and anxieties of the contemporary world caused
by climate disruption, to rethink politics and its project by integrating all the “agents” of life on Earth through the notion of “Terrestrials.” Workers, traders,
or homemakers over fifty, just like viruses, bacteria, oceans, bees, or forests, are all terrestrials. For modern humans, who dream of being “masters and possessors
of nature,” urgently discover that what they considered nature—inert and manipulable at will—is, in reality, a collective of agents that generate one another,
reacting to their blind actions in a domino effect, to the point of questioning their own survival. Finding a ground to land on, a forest to breathe (since
air is also a terrestrial), a soil for a world open to diversity and shared with the diversity of Terrestrials without which we dig our own grave. There is
no mysticism in this, but real politics. “One must not confuse the return of the Earth with the ‘return to the land’ of sinister memory”… One must read
Latour.

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.

Stress

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 Prix3000€ + envoi

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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 Prix2000€ + envoi

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 Prix2000€ + envoi

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!

Street dance

huile sur toile, 162 x 114 cm Prix3500€ + envoi

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.