Starting from black, the first pigment made by man, the ancestral character of the black trace has emerged as the starting point of my work. A medium borrowed from Chinese calligraphy, the black ink spilled on the canvas acts like a tattoo, indelible and definitive. This trace thus formed is similar to the idea of the past, of a memory of the past, of an indelible past constituting our identity. To counterbalance the authority and the immobility of the black trace, I use the gesture as an “ocean of energy”, an expression of “Dan Taï”. According to Han Yu (768-824), “ When one has put all his skill and all his intelligence into the practice of an art and that one acts spontaneously under the dictation from within, according to the movement of the internal energy, the acting power is at its height and independence is assured: no external reality has more hold on us. "*
* Farewell letter to Father Gaoxian
Mnemosyne - The memory gesture
Everything must disappear
"The old world is dying, the new world is slow to appear and in this chiaroscuro monsters appear." *
This sentence, written by Antonio Gramsci (Italian writer and political theorist 1892-1937) between two world wars, can very well be applied to our time: a globalized era dominated by speculation where the aberration of wealth gaps is visible at the planetary level through digital broadcasting, where an overpowered oligarchy leads the world leading to the weakening of the power of states, where we are witnessing national and identity retreats and "the rise of extremes" ...
So, yes I would like to revolutionize everything, to rebel, to see everything disappear.
But, instead of building barricades, brandishing weapons or finding the ways of another possible world, I choose the interior uprising: to spread my refusal in a poetic way through painting. I choose creation as a protest against the emptiness of this world but also as a protest of being in the face of nothingness.
"Stay, you have to choose
And move on to the moment
From life to death
And from being to nothing ”
"To be or not to be **
Dodge this disaster which is narrowly avoided at every moment, but to which the being is nevertheless as close as possible: dodge its own nothingness, its emptiness, but also invade the symbolic nothingness which lies in wait for our materialist world.
Extract from real time to settle in the perpetual time of painting.
One evening of rage, I cover my canvas in black, introducing an unconscious alchemical ritual, then in the morning, comes the time of the repentant, of the work that we heal, to which we give back its chance, a technique of destruction - reconstruction of the picture which constitutes the very act of painting, which transposes this desire to lift which is in itself already a way of replicating.
Everything never really goes away ...
* Antonio Gramsci
** Hamlet monologue translation of Voltaire