PAINTINGS - BOXES
1965
I had been painting for two years. It all started with the pastel box my grand-mother had offered. She would often say: “My grandson will be a painter”. I laughed heartily at her statement, for I wasn’t even able to copy anything vaguely similar to the original. One day, as I was delightfully immersed in drawing, my primary school teacher blurted out: “Isn’t it rather extraordinary that coming from a family of artists you should be so untalented!”
To be sure, that day contributed to making me completely unable to draw anymore. My pencil would only give birth to stereotyped and ridiculous figures. However, the use of colour had liberated me and I couldn’t care less if my drawing was realistic or not. I drew continuously: tormented trees, calvaries, paths going up into the sky, and the backs of two silhouettes invariably walking across the vastness of the landscape. My first oil painting took me three months. Shades of green, dense light dripping like glue from an old lamppost, thick grass on the foreground, a gaunt tree to which a hangman was suspended, a horse-drawing carriage going away to the right…I would painstakingly cover the surface of the canvas, inch by inch. It seemed to me that my painting was alive and that my dream was fleshing out.
The Boxes
Painting didn’t match my need for efficacy any longer, I therefore started the boxes, deeply inspired by Louis Pons. On a painted backdrop or a photograph I would paste a cluster of perishable objects: anchovies, tenderloin steaks, spaghettis, sweets. The sudden meeting of concreteness and of the smooth abstraction of the image bypassed the real and embodied the dream a little.
1976
I left the austere dialectics of the boxes for acrylic painting. Singling out the days gone-by, I would paint on photocopies of old blown out photos, I would keep the outlines only, i.e. the traces of mythic childhood scenes such as my electric train on the cemented terrace, the first swim at the sea, Porquerolles in the summer 55. On the original, I would blot out all the protagonists except me, so as to appear in my heat-rending nakedness.
