blind man in a world of greyness, who while advancing, can stumble. A small light
points in the distance, deceptive, but the void is inexorably in front of his steps.
Bent under the weight of time, this character of the medieval iconography rushes
towards the abyss, confident despite everything in the document that he carries in
hand as well as in the support of his pole.
Solidity of the rock and our certainties, the void, the light: an unpredictable Time
and full of pitfalls. The composition tries to put in relation the full and the empty,
carefully adjusted. It tries to show their tensions, by a slight tilt of the ground on
which the character walks as well as by the neutral (gray) opening of the
circumscribed space.
L’ŒUVRE AU NOIR translates, in graphic form, the ambiguity and fragility of a
certain philosophical research, at the limit of the living world. The icy and rugged
environment in which the character is immersed underlines the danger of this
practice. The subject, dressed as a traveler, is half-kneeling and wrapped around
indefinite shapes, like rocks with soft edges and covered with flame-colored
lichens, the only source of heat in a desperately white universe. Does he burn
himself or does he measure the formal perfection? Whatever the case, no one can
say if he has completely mastered the answers to his questions.
“NEL MEZZO DEL CAMMIN DI NOSTRA VITA” is the first line of Dante
Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, published at the beginning of the fourteenth century.
Dante’s encounter with the Latin poet Virgil allows him to cross the Underworld, a
theme that was suggested to me by the preparation of the background on the paper,
and in the course of the graphic discoveries. The insertion of the character, in 15th
century costume, was imposed later, when three animal shadows could be
identified through the support. To make the whole grey and iridescent transparent
white vibrate, I drew from Barthélémy d’Eyck the strange green that I inserted in
the center of the composition, on the scale of a very vast universe. And the boat of
fire makes the poet slide through the shadows.
EXORCISING THE BLOOD. In an environment of intense heat and splattered
blood, a proud figure from an unknown civilization brandishes a blood-red sword
in a triumphant gesture and looms before an open door, a threshold and abyss still
hidden, but the imminent future of his doom. This symbolic allusion to the tragic
and recurrent violence in history, totally unintelligent in our eyes, is meant to be a
symbolic image with regard to the violence that shocks us today.
BETWEEN US. Two characters, dressed in ancient clothes, are sitting opposite
each other in a dialogue without concession: a Disputatio that could be
philosophical, religious or of any other discipline. In a universe where the fragility
of the colored Japanese paper support is put to the test, wears, scratches, foldings,
collages, transparencies, light strokes, residues of greyness, accompany the
characters by reducing them to a small scale. At the height of this vast universe, an
intense point of red color discordant separates with force the protagonists
DANCING MUSE. A Muse dances on a large red and white curve of foam like a
wave. In this composition, I have constrained the space that separates into a closed
bottom and a larger, more open top. The nature of the curve acts as a spring that
throws forward the Muse, one of those featured in Mantegna’s Parnassus for
Isabella d’Este. Quite a few small, dynamic and darker elements, carefully
controlled, participate in the balance of the composition. The modus operandi uses
the resources of the nature of paper: transparency, fragility, folds, superimpositions,
recovered or transformed suggestions.
ENDYMION. In a universe of reds sometimes veiled to the clouds, the shepherd
Endymion, a mortal whom Diana (Selene) has fallen in love with, is plunged into
an eternal sleep, from where she can contemplate him. I like to inscribe a character
of small dimension in a very vast space, to subject it and adjust it until the natural
expansion of the surface. The latter opposes rhythms and active colors, some tears
around the character, graphic elements that interfere with each other and
complement each other in the oblivion of the subject. The left-right diagonal from
top to bottom creates an acute angle with the subject that tilts the sleeper and
accentuates its mythological significance, that of the chimerical dreams that occupy
our minds.
ALDOBRANDINE WEDDING. Thetis or Julia, sitting for the preparation of her
wedding, shows a great solitude in an indistinct universe and crossed by
zoomorphic shadows, sea bottom or forest mist? Striated with zebra stripes, the
graphic highlights enclose with their filaments the almost transparent presence of
the bride who is living a strange ceremony: what augury does the night bird bring
her?
