Sonata

huile sur toile, 100x100cm

If the sonata, before becoming a determined musical form and thus more or less codified and traditional, was primarily originally music without a voice, it is not so much that it eliminated the voice (of singing) but perhaps rather that it became a voice itself by integrating the modulation inherent to it to become pure music outside of any external or linguistic determination. In his course on painting, Gilles Deleuze came to define the operation of pictorial creation as modulation, making the motif not the referent of an imitation but the emitter (for the painter) of a signal-space that the eye and hand will modulate to produce a resemblance through means that do not resemble, a resemblance that escapes imitation, the resemblance of presence. The forest has no form; when given form, it disappears. For me, it is an encompassing tactile-optical space whose presence, if the painting is successful, pertains to an Energetic. And if one understands nothing about it, that is of no importance because there is nothing to understand: one just needs, as Paul Claudel said, to let the eye listen.

The Glassworks

huile sur toile, 116×89 cm Coll. particulière

From the 16th century to the 18th century, the forest of Sainte-Croix, like most forests in Ariège, housed glassworks whose “master glassmakers,” primarily Protestants, were persecuted following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes by the tyrant Louis XIV. Glassworks were destroyed at that time, and the privileges granted by Charles VII to these noble families ruined by the Hundred Years’ War were called into question. “Around 1715, the master of the Mauvezin glassworks (of Sainte-Croix) was Octave de Grenier du Sarat, father of the three Grenier brothers beheaded for their faith,” reports Gustave Ducos in his memoir “Sainte-Croix and its Monastery.” During the “Réveillées” (the name for the production periods during winter), the families of Verbizier or Grenier produced bottles, hourglasses, jugs, and particularly glasses that had the reputation of shattering if poison was poured into them… Christine Miramont notes in her work on glassworks that the ruins of the Porteteny glassworks, which belonged to the Verbizier family, and that of Labourdette, which was part of the Grenier family, can still be found, lost in the Royal Forest of Sainte-Croix de Volvestre. But only the heron still holds the secret of the glassmakers…

The Mirror of the Fairies

huile sur toile, 100x100cm

Here, it is the forest of tales, the source of the imaginary, this old Childlike world. The painting acts as a pause of the image, not a freeze frame, but rather a solemn arrest of the image. Neither the capture of a fragment of time nor its interruption: a solemn arrest that opens an imaginary time. I look at the painting as I look at the monsters or the battles that Leonardo da Vinci discovered in the clouds or the leprosy of an old wall. For the skin of the forest is tattooed with skies crossed by the fairies of tales. Thus, in the image, time becomes a spiral, no longer a procession of losses. After all, what is art if not all these spirals boring into the materials that populate us?

From bottom to top

huile sur toile, 100×100 cm

“What is below is like what is above, and what is above is like what is below,” teaches the second proposition of the Emerald Tablet. Attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, the “thrice great,” a mythical philosopher whose earliest references date back to the second century BC in the writings of scholars from the city of Alexandria, Egypt, then occupied by the Greeks, the Emerald Tablet itself is believed to have been written around the third century AD. For Hermes Trismegistus, this unknown figure who exists only for those who have heard of him, is the resurgent myth of the founder of Hermeticism (this initiatory knowledge), the bearer of a revelation that incorporates that of the god Thoth of ancient Egypt and will develop through Kabbalah and alchemy over the centuries, while Neo-Platonic Christians will make him a sort of prophet of the Christic epiphany. The thought of analogy is at the heart of the alchemical dream. From bottom to top, the snail dribbles in the sky like a shooting star.

Spot

huile sur toile, 100x100cm

I am a modest painter. I do not claim to discover America, nor do I have any authority in Contemporary Art. I only try to make visible what I see, as I see it. In “A Philosophy of Solitude,” the British writer John Cowper Powys considers humility to be the most important thing in the world, the second being pride. I have given to humility, so let’s move on to pride: I am a voyeurist. I seek to manipulate the desire of what I see. A voyeurist is not a voyeur because the latter is focused on sexual desire, nor is he a seer because it is not the desire for the future but the desire for the present, this presence that I see and wish to make visible to art lovers. This presence is another name for light and glory. Spotlight… But, well, art is for those who want it, and here the voyeuristic painter shines as best he can. Do you see what I see?

The Landscape

huile sur toile, 89x116cm

This painting raises the question of landscape. What is a landscape today? A tourist attraction? The visible part of the environment? A factor in land use planning? European philosophical history suggests that the inclusion of the garden as one of the fine arts by Kant reflects a transformation in the conception of the relationship between humans and nature. Jacques Rancière wrote “The Time of the Landscape” on this subject. Indeed, the awareness of the growing human footprint in the configuration of the landscape makes it the fruit of a history. Humans and nature are engaged together in and through the landscape. “The landscape is the observable expression through the senses on the surface of the Earth of the combination between nature, techniques, and human culture,” says landscaper Jean-Robert Pitte. The question then becomes one of the proportion or balance of this combination, as landscapes can now be urban or industrial. This combination is the specialty and the hot topic for professional landscapers. In painting, after dominating the Impressionist scene, the landscape has receded in favor of the expression and intervention of the artist, from Expressionism to Land Art… This painting indicates to me that my “Forests” are not landscapes.

What is brewing

huile sur toile 100×100 cm

I remember an incursion into the equatorial forest of Congo thirty years ago. We were in Mbandaka with a friend, waiting in vain for the floating city boat that was supposed to take us back to Kinshasa. To pass the time, we decided to visit the forest, the territory of the Pygmies. When they venture into the city, they are treated by the Bantus as subhumans. We asked the taxi driver (a Bantu) to randomly take us to the end of one of the paths that delve into Pygmy territory. As we progressed, the driver became more and more nervous. The path ended in a Pygmy village where I asked the Chief to show us around in exchange for a gift for the village… Off we went, two men with machetes clearing the way, and two men with machetes bringing up the rear behind the chief, the sorcerer, my friend, and me, along with the increasingly nervous driver in the stifling humidity of the primary forest. The chief introduced us to the dead of the village, whose spirits rested in tiny colorful houses scattered under the trees. Then we ventured into a kind of swamp between enormous roots, infinite trunks, and cries of animals unknown to us. But after about twenty minutes of walking, screams erupted from behind. Our driver was gesticulating wildly as if shaken by electric shocks, while the two Pygmies at the end of the procession seemed determined to cut him into pieces. Our driver, so disdainful towards them in the city, was here gripped by panic, dominated by the spirits complicit with the men of the forest. We had to negotiate his safety with the Chief and shorten our visit to remove our Bantu taxi from the magic of the forests. For everything signals in the forest. The shapes, the tracks, the sounds, the cries, the cracklings, the rustlings, the changing patterns of light and shadow, the strange contrasts of colors… Anyone who has slept alone in the forest knows these fanfares of signals. In our land, the Druids drew secrets of divination from them.

Homunculus

huile sur toile, 100×100 cm

Paracelsus, in his “De natura rerum,” provides the recipe for creating the homunculus, a small man to whom alchemical artifice grants life. Neurobiology, with Penfield’s homunculus modified by contemporary investigation, sees it as the neural projection of the human body, where different proportions in the brain reflect the varying degrees of importance of specific limbs or organs in motor or sensory functions. Here, this homunculus can be all of that and more because the painter has discovered it conceived in the forest. “Painting is a mental object that compels me to see it through its own gaze, meaning I must strip it of its references to see it according to the painter’s vision. My thought then enters into what was thought within it. An infinite task, for this object is neither a statement nor the key to a truth that it can make me access. No, it is only itself: merely the trace of a thought that makes me think.” Bernard Noël in “Journal du regard.”

Spiderman

huile sur toile, 116×89 cm

A moment of respite before attempting to save the world.

Nostalgia of the Tribe

huile sur toile, 100x100cm

Unlike photography, in painting light is born from matter. Pictorial figuration does not capture a presence; it fosters it, extricating it from the mud. Rembrandt like Delacroix knew something about that… Thus, painting is particularly complicit with memory, capable of evoking reminiscence. As for colors, I see them as regimes, modalities of matter. And form, it is the product of an abstraction; when dominant, it suffocates. Therefore, it must be handled with the utmost care.

Cézanne, get out of that body!

huile sur toile, 50×50 cm Coll. particulère

Certainly, USB drives did not exist in the time of the undisputed master of Modern Art, but constructing a coherent pictorial space, detached from geometric space yet filled with a doubled presence expressed simultaneously—both that of the motif and that of the painting—is, for me, the whole body of Cézanne. This morning, the brilliant grumpy man from Aix-en-Provence forced my hand; I have no other hypothesis to offer. Come on, Cézanne, get out of that body!

détail

The Clearing

huile sur toile, 89×116 cm

“Being struck by the sight of a twisted tree among others of its kind, which are different or not of the same kind, is to be inclined toward the act of contorting the double that is the tree and which exempts me from twisting myself, since it does it on my behalf. Finding a stone along the way, precious because of its seemingly hermetic relationship to my existence at first glance, is to feel that it precisely responds, in the morphological order of its language, to an emotion within me that had been previously unexpressed. — But seeing the tree and discovering the stone presupposes, like intuition and before it, a particular state of vigilance or attention, directed towards these identities between the individual and the external world.” — Hans Bellmer, in “The Little Anatomy of the Image.”

Changing reflections of the Deer pond

huile sur toile, 116×89 cm Coll particulière

“You would like me to describe it so you can start thinking about it, just as you do with everything else. However, in the case of SEE, it is absolutely not a matter of thinking, so I cannot tell you what it is like to SEE. Furthermore, you want me to explain the reasons for my controlled madness, and I can only tell you that my controlled madness is very much like the act of SEE. It is something that cannot be thought about.” — Carlos Castaneda, in “SEE : the teachings of don Juan.”

Also to be seen with the eye of the frog…

To become forest

huile sur toile, 100×100 cm

Not to see and paint a landscape, but to dive into it like diving into the sea: to see and paint the landscape within it, within the forest, inside its outside, as a participant, an event in its biotope, without distancing a subject, without a priori discriminating between background and form, tree and leaves, root and reflections, color and light. To become forest in order to see like a fallen trunk, to see like an insect, like the moss, like the wind shaking the leaves, like the branches creaking, to see with the ears, with the nose, with the skin, with the hand. To paint not a thing but a “becoming,” as Gilles Deleuze would say. To become forest by becoming paint.

The Awakening of Silenus

huile sur toile, 116×89 cm

The adoptive father of Dionysus, often associated with the Satyr, Silenus is one of the major spirits of the forest. Often drunk, he mingles with the Maenads in the procession of his son, the dismembered god, the god of vital intoxication and theater. He is said to possess incomparable wisdom, which he nonetheless refuses to share. King Midas, eager to acquire his knowledge, imprisoned him in order to obtain his truth under duress. It is reported that Silenus made this statement to him: “The best thing for man would be not to be born, and if he is born, to die as soon as possible…” To hear only the truth of absolute pessimism is to disregard the context of imprisonment and to miss the terrible irony of the sentence. Silenus is not pessimistic; he is drunk, drunk on life and death, like the forest that shelters him.

The Escape from the Louvre

huile sur toile, 90×116 cm

In painting today, the nude is not in vogue. Photography, however, does not shy away from it. But aside from a few exceptions, like the magnificent nudes by Bettina Rheims, mannequins have replaced models in front of the camera, adhering to an aesthetic of line that often resembles automotive design. Is it any wonder that the models rebel? Thus, a most strange event occurred in Paris on the night of September 15 to 16, so unusual that despite the silence imposed by the Louvre’s management, I cannot resist the urge to publish it. Indeed, that night, outsmarting all the security systems of one of the most famous museums in the world, a group of models escaped to protest in the streets of the capital against the invisibility imposed on them by contemporary painting. A few rare Parisians witnessed it but did not dare to speak out for fear of being deemed crazy. One of them even claimed to have seen the Venus of Urbino, which seems impossible since it is in the Uffizi in Florence…

Kundalini

huile sur toile, 100×100 cm

The vegetable garden is a major element in the diet of neo-rurals. Cultivating leeks, turnips, salads, radishes, and squashes without artificial intelligence provides some eager-minded individuals with a mental peace conducive to meditation. Epicurus knew that the garden is a psychotropic space. The Kundalini can climb the chakras while bouncing around there. For the neo-rurals are a bit mystical in some ways, as they believe that one can live happily.

The Painter’s Tarot

huile sur toile, 116×90 cm

Jacques Lacan would have said: ça le taraude ! (it gnaws at him!) For modern art has questioned the painter. Some have bet on expression, others on perception, some have turned the canvas into an image, while others have refused the question and become the makeshift comedians and theorists of the unspeakable. Yet the question is always there. In the bohemian tarot of painters, I drew this card. I don’t know what it’s worth. But it speaks to me of this and that, and of what desire can see with it. Perhaps that is what painting is?

Failed Selfie

huile sur toile, 80×80 cm

Catastrophe! I look awful! And then it’s cut off. Erase that!… What a Pop selfie this is! A pop-up, even. Thankfully, we have thumbs. Thumbs up! Deleting is not playing… We are horrible, it’s true, but we appear and disappear, without even a nudge. Luckily, we carefully cultivate the act of appearing, the beauty of appearing. Even the horrible is not alone. Art is here to show it.

Vertical

huile sur toile, 116×90 cm

Between the tactile verticality of the surface and the ideal suggestion of a space, the painting traces the visible like its prey, the buzzard, on the wall of the forest.

Jacob’sladder

huile sur toile, 100x100cm, coll. particulière

Heaven is a forest, here and now. But we must care for it, for the snows are not eternal and Jacob’s ladder is also Richter’s (in French the same word is for ladder and scale). We must judge it, not to evaluate or calculate, but to embrace it, to restore its future. Here, it is not the Likert scale; the forest is not a service but an incalculable possibility, an idea, an idea of Earthpeople, that needs to be urgently shared. We certainly can’t end up on the Bristol scale!

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 coll. particulière

“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.

Looking at this forest, it is capable of playing with geometry but without believing in it…

The Green Room

huile sur toile, 100×100 cm coll. particulière

‘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.

More of a bird or more of a plane?…

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.

I wonder where this astronaut is going?…

Disappearance

huile sur toile, 100×100 cm Coll Particulière

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.

You saw the hunters, they did not see you. The fox is watching you to see if you will betray it…

Portrait of the Artist as a Forest Spirit

huile sur toile, 100×100 cm, coll. particulière

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 Coll Particulière

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 Coll Particulière

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 Coll Particulière

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 coll. particulière

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.