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.

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.”

War

huile sur toile, 100x100cm

no comment

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.

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!

The artist, portrait of Philippe Pacalet

huile sur toile, 100 x100 cm

I knew Philippe Pacalet by reputation… I remember a lunch with a wealthy winemaker from Languedoc who, when I announced my preference for “natural” wines, brought up from his cellar a magnum without a label from a batch vinified without additives. It was his wine but transformed in its suppleness, its flesh, and the freshness of its fruit. He had made this experiment by hiring Philippe Pacalet. In my series of portraits of winemakers, I needed this “artist” whose wines, from numerous plots owned by the Côtes de Nuits and Beaune that he manages and vinifies for himself, exalt the natural beauty of Burgundy’s terroirs. My friend Roberto Petronio, collaborator of the Revue des Vins de France, had me taste them, and he organized a meeting at Philippe’s in Beaune. In the kitchen of his apartment where his Brazilian wife offered us dinner, I took a few photos and Roberto, better equipped, took some more assured ones. Armed with these shots and the memory of the tasting in the cellar that initiated this delightful evening, I attempted this portrait of a man whom I probably don’t know well enough to capture all facets, but of whom I believe I caught a glimpse of his presence.

Ô scarole!…

huile sur toile, 20×20 cm, coll. particulière Prix500€ + envoi

May Chuck Berry forgive me for this title. I enjoyed half of this salad for lunch, I kept the heart for the studio. Escarole is fragile, you have to be quick before its cascade of leaves collapses. Hopefully, we’ll eat it…