Artist Statement

We are in the quantum and digital age. And the infinitely small also unfolds in the poetic world. It is invisible but nevertheless very present in my life, since the interference between my feelings and those of others, especially all the living beings around me, constantly influence me. Why does this matter to me and how do I account for it? How can we appreciate its poetics in a pictorial way? 

Technique and mediums

For my drawings, I always use Indian ink, because it doesn't fade in the light. Generally, I work on granulated paper (designed for watercolor) and less often on smooth paper. I mainly use small or medium formats, because they require more attention because of the space constraint imposed. This constraint is enriching.

For my paintings, I mainly use oil paint. As a lover of reading, I sometimes enrich certain canvases with pasted texts, taken from books or newspapers. These techniques allow me to play with textures, contrasts, transparencies and the unexpected. I work with the material in disordered layers, in the search for a depth that is more evocative than descriptive. To account for the constant interference of the infinitely small in our human universe, I choose to interconnect a figurative approach to that of abstraction, and vice versa. For me, it's a question of playing with one another to open to the unpredictable, to what can be confusing with an image that is too quick to appear. Keep access to imagination without trying to control it. It is also important for me not to fully control the process, to expose my contemporary sensibility and collect the benefits. The whole advantage of the oil technique is that it can be applied and removed, melted or dispersed, accentuated or attenuated, in a word, explored on the canvas. Play with multiple variances always possible.

Creative approach

In painting, I move forward in a chaotic way by deciding whether or not to keep this or that line, this or that flat, this or that form in relation to what I am looking for. By choosing multiple shades and lines that mistreat the figuration, I could get lost. But by letting myself be crossed by what the images bring me, little by little, I find their place in the whole picture. It progresses by driving me with it.

In drawing, I don't have the possibility to go back. The ink does not fade on the paper. As with watercolor, once the line is laid, it can no longer be removed. You must deal with it, find other ways to adjust the drawing to make it acceptable. This constraint creates amusing surprises: it opens to humor and leads me to play even more with possible forms to evoke the human and what is bothering him.

In painting as in drawing, I navigate between nuance and vigor, precision and vagueness, between what is said and what remains silent. The mastery of the gesture joins the randomness of it. This process, long and delicate in painting but fast and unexpected in drawing, is my way of revealing the sensitive world. The figures (characters, animals, landscapes, trees or objects) are silent encounters, with no beginning or end, captured in a perpetual momentum. They fade away and recreate themselves, like a microcosm in constant metamorphosis. Transparencies and continuities of colors or lines serve as a support for an infinite game of possibilities, where the invisible mixes with the visible. I use the resources of abstraction to reveal presences and rhythms that can be guessed without being shown. I want to celebrate the subtle interferences that connect us to others, to the living and the dead, and to the environment, bright or dark, that surrounds us. Through the play of light and shadow, I look for the vibratory lines in the bodies of the living. I look for the abundant and tenacious randomness that animates them. There is a dialogue between my gesture (thicker, thinner, offbeat, more curved, etc.) and what this line creates as a sensation in me. In drawing as in painting, I discover what I am looking for while I am doing it. I explore what I draw or paint during this action. Is this my way of loving the living, by accepting the impromptu to endure its shadow?

Influences

Attracted to Impressionist paintings at a very young age, I appreciated, through their contacts, several ways of revealing the sensible world. Maturity opened me up to other painters, more classical or more modern. I integrated the possibility of abstraction as an alternative pictorial reality. Thus, my Brazilian childhood and Western painting in its diversity created a breeding ground, which I enriched through the practice of holistic therapy (Gestalt-therapy). Finally, through my encounters and readings in Central and West Africa, over a period of twenty years, I have identified the subterranean forces that animate these peoples. My artistic work ventures to touch the rhythms of opening and closing of various powerful elements of the living. Because if immaterial forces influence our lives, how can we depict them?