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 paintings, I mainly use oil paint. As a lover of reading, I sometimes enrich certain canvases with pasted texts, taken from books or newspapers. I also like the material of watercolor paper, especially for drawing with Indian ink. 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 with the other to open to the unpredictable, to what can be confusing with an image that is too fast. Open up to the imagination without trying to control it. It is also important for me not to fully control the process, in order to expose my contemporary sensibility and reap the benefits. The advantage of the oil technique is that it can be applied and removed, melted or dispersed, accentuated or attenuated, it can be explored on the spot, on the canvas. Playing with multiple variances is always possible.

Creative approach

Painting, by its very material, is a play of light and shadow. For my part, I search for the vibratory lines of the living bodies. In the tradition of the Impressionists, I strive to capture the tender, this almost tactile quality of existence, which I situate between the flesh and the soul, the degradable and the resistant, the visible and the unspeakable. But, perhaps unlike them, I am looking for the abundant and tenacious randomness that animates the living. It takes the form of a dialogue between my gesture, my attempt (thicker, thinner, offbeat, more curved, etc.) and what this line creates in terms of sensation in me. I paint to discover. You could say that I paint through my gaze, which decides whether to keep this or that line, this or that flat, this or that shape in relation to what I'm looking for. But I discover what I'm looking for while I'm painting. I explore what I paint while I paint it. Am I a painter-traveller because I travel while I paint? Or is it my way of loving the living to endure its shadow?

By choosing multiple shades and lines that mistreat the figuration, I could get lost. By letting myself be crossed by what the images bring me, little by little, I find their place in the pictorial whole. He progresses by training me with him. 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, sometimes long and delicate, is my way of revealing the sensitive world. The figures (characters, animals, landscapes, trees or objects) that I paint are silent encounters, without 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. My art is a celebration of these subtle interferences that connect us to others, to the living and the dead, and to the environment, bright or dark, that surrounds us.

My 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 that 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 explores the boundaries between these different elements of life. Because if immaterial forces influence our lives, how can we depict them?