Movements, traces and holes

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For several years now, my work as a painter has questioned the fragmentary nature of the image, its autonomy and  its recomposition. Very early in my research, I used pieces of cut-out paintings, placed one on top of the other in order to create, in these shifts, these fragments, new painted images.

This course of "  collage painting  »Led me to do a lot of work on braiding and veiling / revealing. The paintings on which I worked then, were systematically cut into strips and braided, structured between them and stretched on frames, in order to obtain a reappearance of new images.

These creative processes undoubtedly appeared following my work in engraving, and especially in lithography, which I practiced when I graduated from the Beaux Arts in Paris.

About the "  stitching  I undertook it using a Singer sewing machine to replace the glue I used before.

My collages have become "  stitching  ".

My way of using and working with the medium has changed.

The support  is now  painted, drawn, inked, sewn, creating a new material superimposed on the first.

The support is then divided into small more or less identical squares depending on the desired effect. These fragmented pieces then gathered and stitched together, giving new forms of painting.

This process of fragmentation can be repeated over and over again  creating density and an excessive difference between the part and the whole.

The thread in black and white or in color is used not only to assemble but also to draw, and to architect. It is not a simple line, nor an outline but beyond the void that it encircles, this thread determines rhythm and movement.

The thread, visible or not, connecting the spaces and the various surfaces becomes the  true vector of my work. The thread emphasizes the importance of the joints.

In my paintings, the cuts create emptiness and fullness, the outside and the inside suggesting kinds of territories.

The thread emphasizes time intervals and  space, breathe life into my painting and make visible the trace of a suspended movement.

From cuts into seams, from splitting up into assemblages, from "  holes  " in "  stitching  »Thus emerge and undulate my paintings which, freed from the frame, have moved away from the picture rail until abstaining from it.

Thus, the "  holes  " and  "  stitching  »Punctuating the space and creating volumes, they become mobile; the thread which crosses them from point to point then gives a trace to moving undulations, varying according to the supports used.

I use three types of media.

- Tyvek,  synthetic non-woven material, made from polyethylene fibers is for me the most suitable support.
It is just as important as the papers I use. A kind of modern paper, it has been involved in my work since  several years.

- The bark of the mulberry tree,  material that has the grain and texture of wood, as well as the flexibility of  tissue,  allows me to have a dense finish. I paint it most often in black.

- Japanese paper, a delicate and fragile material since it is generally quite fine and with subtle colors, responds to a more recent period of my research.

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My current research on traces, imprints and movements, as well as on the incompleteness and ambiguity of the veiled-unveiled, highlights the already more and the not yet.
My most recent paintings-stitchings  open up new fields of experimentation and question me on how to present my work to better show it and  hear.
I was led to wonder  : how to present  my paintings.
They can be suspended, hung, spread out or rolled-unveiled like a sort of Emaki, rolls of images telling a story and where the perspective changes as it unfolds.
In this research on a presentation device, I try to avoid general perspectives and to multiply, the points of view and  travel.
Painting for me involves a journey that creates my own unknown and enigmatic path and works through the veiled-unveiled an unfolding that makes time and space heard.

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Paris 2012