Peintre
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.
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 do with it. Perhaps that is what painting is?
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.
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.
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?
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…
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?
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, 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!
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.
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.
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.
“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 earth does not belong to us, we borrow it from our children…
no comment
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.
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.
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.
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?
“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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
le vent des moulins
Pour moi, c’est une blague expressionniste métaphysique.
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.
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.