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.” 

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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 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.

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.

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…

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.