Fungi

Technique: acrylic painting.
Exhibition available in several formats.

"I realized that I was constantly moving between three conventional categories - landscape, portrait, vegetation - each pushed to different degrees of abstraction, all blending together. A landscape can end up as a portrait, and vice versa: the only challenge is the surprise of the reversals. I like the imbalance, the seesaw, the moment when everything is about to collapse and I have to catch up with everything.

I paddle forward.

I impose on myself the constraints of a diarist: a sky a day, a page of mushrooms, a collage or a small canvas. I scrutinize. I move from large format to very small, from the shoulder to the wrist, it's almost the same thing. I call out the colors aloud, the tubes, the pigments. It reassures me to name them.

I start over a lot.

The perilous paintings that sometimes require months of work and the jubilant paintings, done very quickly, have in common the impetus - an idea! - the desire to go for it, to launch oneself, the fleeting vision that whets the appetite. I like the beginning, the attack. The hour of possibilities.

Only astonishment gives me the feeling of moving forward. I cannot do what I have already been able to do.

“My stubbornness—my beautiful concern—is color. I work for several months on large canvases, until something vibrant appears in the covering, the transfer, and the movement. It is the vegetal that appears, but it is the underlying organic that interests me. I look for the pulp in the rhizome or in the leaf, to account for the fleeting vision of growth or bursting. I proceed by successive layers, all of which contaminate each other and all of which retain the trace of the pentimenti. Each color feeds on the one it covers.”