On being human
Writing has always been an essential part of my life. I have written to earn a living and written to express myself in the literary realm.
In recent years, for months and months on end, I painted writing in the form of stenciled letters, cursive letters, squiggles, or graffitti-like lines. That writing always hinted to a word, a discourse.
Then, quite suddenly, the human body invaded my painting with a remarkable insistence.
On one hand, after travelling to Africa and the Middle East, I became fascinated with the ancient small statues, called « Venus » for lack of a better word by the archaelogists who found them. Their raw beauty, coupled to their astonishing modernity, hinted to a fascinating esthetics of feminity, quite remote from the prevalent one in today’s society.
On the other hand, the evolving nature of gender led me to explore the concepts not only of ambiguity, undetermination, secrecy, but also of what is shared by all human beings: vital organs, skin, hair, ageing, beauty, sensuality, movement, life, pain and death.
Accordingly, my painting now hovers between figuration and abstraction, in a kind of middle ground that perfectly fits my exploration.
I often seem to erase, scratch off or cover the brushstrokes I previously made. But the paint that has once been laid on a support never totally disappears, like sound is supposed to travel forever and ever in the universe. So my paintings bear and tell stories, stories made of numerous layers or iterations, stories that the viewers have to discover, read and recreate for themselves.
That is why writing has not totally left my painting. It still sneaks in or around the bodies, like a discourse on feminity, feminism, gender, and sex that needs to be rewritten with every generation.
Writing has always been an essential part of my life. I have written to earn a living and written to express myself in the literary realm.
In recent years, for months and months on end, I painted writing in the form of stenciled letters, cursive letters, squiggles, or graffitti-like lines. That writing always hinted to a word, a discourse.
Then, quite suddenly, the human body invaded my painting with a remarkable insistence.
On one hand, after travelling to Africa and the Middle East, I became fascinated with the ancient small statues, called « Venus » for lack of a better word by the archaelogists who found them. Their raw beauty, coupled to their astonishing modernity, hinted to a fascinating esthetics of feminity, quite remote from the prevalent one in today’s society.
On the other hand, the evolving nature of gender led me to explore the concepts not only of ambiguity, undetermination, secrecy, but also of what is shared by all human beings: vital organs, skin, hair, ageing, beauty, sensuality, movement, life, pain and death.
Accordingly, my painting now hovers between figuration and abstraction, in a kind of middle ground that perfectly fits my exploration.
I often seem to erase, scratch off or cover the brushstrokes I previously made. But the paint that has once been laid on a support never totally disappears, like sound is supposed to travel forever and ever in the universe. So my paintings bear and tell stories, stories made of numerous layers or iterations, stories that the viewers have to discover, read and recreate for themselves.
That is why writing has not totally left my painting. It still sneaks in or around the bodies, like a discourse on feminity, feminism, gender, and sex that needs to be rewritten with every generation.
