Each painting teaches you life lessons. There is something vertiginous in the process of Abstract painting. It is like a big fall in the unknown of the creative process, at some point you feel like flying, at another one you freeze because you don’t know how to move forward, you can even reach of point of elevation. Connecting, the points, the dots, makes the whole experience. The uncertainty of the end result is kind of exhilarating and scary. It is you against the elements, and with the elements, all in once.
To illustrate this behind the curtain story, I would like to share with you one of my latest work. I made it in Aubervilliers, near Paris, when I was in residence in La Villa-Mais d’ici in August; I called it “Resilience in chaos”.
Painting as a process can be a beautiful metaphor for how you live your life. If I reveal what happened in the studio, you will know that there are several layers of different images that will never be seen, just because when I paint them, they don’t please me anymore, and I keep searching: borrowing from reality, distilling, expressing, destructing, reconstructing, adding more, finding words by chance through a poetry book of Alfred De Musset. Even if these texts don’t belong to the 21st century, poems from a vulnerable and open soul belong to eternity. And I keep playing, because life is a big game: texture, lines and colours with a paintbrush, a hand, a foot, a “peace” of wood. Sometimes I also leave the medium talk by itself, I drop and direct paint in a very Pollock fashion, let it dry, observes, and then changes the composition. Then time is ticking and drying is required before adding anything else. Through the process there are lots of discoveries. The beauty of an unexpected line can change the balance. And then it is done, “it lives by itself”. It exists there, on a slightly off square piece of wood I found, absolutely non-symmetrical and full of holes done by a previous owner. I had to deal with its past, to create something new. “Resilience in chaos” is born.
As much as I love « La Haine » from Matthew Kassovitz, movie hit from my teenage’ years, I want to challenge its most famous line: « How you fall doesn't matter. It's how you land!” or in original language “L’important, c’est pas la chute, mais l’atterrissage”
In my opinion the fall does matter. There’s beauty in the fall, before the landing.
In this perspective painting is like a vertiginous flight, and if the landing is the end result, the beauty is also in the process. And the fall becomes an elevation.
Thinking of Van Gogh, De Kooning and lots of other master painters. Inspiration and lessons all along.
Merci.
