These works belong to different eras and projects. I think their common ground could be the theme of disturbing strangeness. This expression is the translation from the German “Das Unheimlische”. The German etymology of this expression refers to the breaking of the strange into the familiar, the loss of the home and its values of intimacy.
This is a theme I have been working on for several years. I proceed by combining various iconographic materials, photos, films, drawings that come from the internet or come from my own researches. I make free associations between them, according to plastic, chromatic or narrative affinities.
Landscapes, interior scenes or portraits actually combine lineaments of mythical, family and historical events. Versions of the world interfere with each other to form a visual whose narrative thread remains in suspense. The story becomes so strange that you can hardly explain it. My purpose is to paint the beginnings of an event whose name we lack, – to capture the fragile appearance which emerges as a symptom or as a strange promise. We know that painting has worked for centuries under the tutelage of great stories. What interests me is when these narratives are suspended. The Passion of Christ, the myths of Babel, Goliath, Leda, Pegasus are thus interpreted through slight displacements which contradict their visual syntax and their narrative postulates.
I associate the great masters of painting and photography with fragments of drawings or photos in my research notebooks. An incise in the phrasing of their worlds, which have become partly foreign, produces their discreet inner mutation. A new disposition passes through these worlds because of their relationship. In my paintings, you can see the scars of historical accidentality. The absurdity of some scenes expresses excessiveness, loneliness or the extravagance of madness. But this excess of nature, history or the human soul never excludes the possibility of a renewal, or an utopia. Hope is the belief that you can also see on them. You often have to look for it through some jarring detail. As the French poet Verlaine says: “Hope shines like a straw in the stable”.
