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

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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

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!

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.