Intention

Pushed by the always growing media, most of the pictures are devoted to a message : they illustrate an aim, have to sell a product. They have been conceived to penetrate in a flash our intellect, to pass on their message : commercial, ideological, utopian… always proselyte. They rape our glance which has not yet the time to question them when, already, the reason has assimilated their message.

The eye, formerly, was a tremendous tool to question the world, to build self-identity (what is made of the space around me -> what role do I want to play in this space) is nowadays submissive, relegated to the role of the orifice through which penetrate the will of graphic designers, admen, journalists, artistes, who are using the pictures to impose their point of view.
In those conditions, how to keep our liberty to see ?

My answer consist in the practice of antidote-pictures : I mean pictures that don’t give themselves, in which one must look for signs that enable their reading, pictures that would stimulate the imagination of the onlooker instead of being the expression of the imagination of the creator.

At the origin of my pictures there is a photography.
Once digitized, I will split up the signs that enable their reading : for example, a piece of architecture will be split up into independent elements such as its color, its texture, its shadows…
Those elements are then duplicated, moved, piled up on successive layers in a composition where the photo is transmuted into a painting, where the symbols which were accelerating the reading are now questioning the understanding, where the glance is no more locked into a single reading course where it jump from a texture to a color, from a color to a shape into a multitude of possible combinations, chaotic.

Once finished in the virtual space, the picture is materialized, it becomes a painting.
I print my pictures at the Atelier Bordas (printer of the world famous French artist : Pierre Alechinsky) on a textured heavy arch paper using museal long conservation pigment ink looking like gouache.
Framed, hanged and lightened, I look at my antidotes-pictures and I test there imaginative force. In most of them I see faces : portraits of the spirit of the photographed place. And, if after that, I name my paintings that is not to impose my vision to the onlooker but to suggest him to look for his own interpretation.