Artistic approach

At the birth of Europe, in the sixties, I went to secondary school at the Ecole Supérieure de Luxembourg, then back to France, in Sarlat, I followed the courses dispensed at Saint Joseph de Sarlat, a former Jesuit school.

I decided to become a painter when aged 15, and I have stuck to my decision ever since.

I then chose to go to Brussels, to study the Fine Arts. I chose Brussels for two main reasons: my admiration for the Flemish Primitive School (especially their colours), and the school dispenses a technical training that has long been abandoned in France.

Before I started studying painting, I needed a degree in drawing plus a year of training in pictural technique (pigments, binders, agglutinants, thinners...).

My studies in Brussels led me to two conclusions:

• to be a painter is a full-time job.
• Technique, far from hampering creation, actually helps it.

That’s why I decided to become exclusively and whole-heartedly a painter.

After a normal start in my career, 1991 was the first turn in my career. That’s when I decided:

• to give up shows altogether
• to break with my agent, since I didn’t agree anymore with the French commercial system that the former was all too wont to follow – he was an advocate of stereotyped and industrial production, and pretended to manage my artistic creation.
• To launch a thematic exhibition on Venice, designed all at once, which was my first commercial success.

This turn in my career was fundamental. From that moment on, I decided to trail my blaze, and stay off the beaten path. I followed my own thoughts, organised exhibitions myself, and my artistic sensitivity kept taking shape.

Little by little, my reflexion on painting matured:

• Art is an epiphany. The problem with art is eschatological. The first apparition of art – pebbles coated with ochre – was found in the first known human burial ground (60,000 BC).
• If Art is an epiphany, it is directly linked with the beliefs or faith, formalised or not, of a society. The Western world has an incarnate God. Its art therefore cannot be totally realistic (this would negate the divine part in Art), nor abstract (this would negate the incarnate part). The Western Art can consequently be only figurative, not realistic.
• If Art is an epiphany, its expression must be universal. Therefore, it shouldn’t integrate the moods, or sensitivity of the artist, nor should it reflect the navel-gazing tendency of the would-be creator.

In 1997, the city where I live, Villeneuve sur Lot, in South-Western France, offered me to design an important exhibition. This was the second turn in my career, and the first of my conceptual exhibitions: the Ark.

Conception stems from a few simple ideas.

• The exhibition is no longer a succession of paintings, even thematic, but it is composed globally, and each painting is part of a whole, where each element is linked to the others, interdependendently, like organs in a live being. I never relinquished this idea, and I came to give up classic exhibitions.
• A universal theme (the Flood and the Ark) enables everone to feel concerned.
• Painting – outside any art current – should concern everyone, whether they’re children scholars, or “Académiciens”.

These ideas led to the creation of a puzzle, 14 yards long and 3.4 yards high – which was immediately successful.

The Ark sailed across France, Belgium and Luxemburg, and a book was published on this adventure.

In 2000, I was presented with an offer: I could exhibit my work in a 14^th century chapel. It matched what I was looking for. I adapted the conception of the exhibition to the place itself. Seven different locations in the chapel were to be easily isolated: three spots aligned lengthways in the nave, and four in the side chapels. Each spot was devoted to one idea: these were the seven virtues.

This exhibition, invited by the city of Avila – which was a great honour to me – marked another stage:

• Painting is designed for one place, one use, and it therefore regains its ancient, pre-Renaissance role in this.
• The work depends on the architecture, it is integrated to the volumes.
• Still carrying on in the research on the specificity of Art, this exhibition saw the appearance of volume (colums, sculptures), decorative devices (abstract decorative backgrounds, covering cymas on which paintings are fixed), as well as other arts (ceramic fountain in the middle of the chapel).
• And to make everything come true, I needed to resort to other skills, and I thus started to work along with other craftsmen and artists.

In 2005 I was back in the chapel for the third conceptual exhibition. This time, its subjst was the gardens, as expressing paradise lost, in each civilisation. I continued to explore the thicket of ideas I had started stepping into years before.

• I found that the artist must adapt his means of expression to the subject itself, and to each subject (Japanese gardens are almost abstract, English gardens are somewhat hazy, and as for French gardens, they’re immaculately precise): therefore, the subject dictates its terms, and must be obeyed to. The painter is a servant of the subject, and it never works the other way round.
• I kept opening up to other arts, photography in particular, and to volumes, in my designing low tables, jars, screens and partitions, topiary art and materials. I also worked in collaboration with other crafts and skills, such as wrought-iron craftsmen

In 2007, my fourth and last concpetual exhibition took place, and it was the Jeu de l’Oie – the game of snakes and ladders (the name in French is the Goose Game, much more poetical than its English equivalent). Sixty three paintings representing the sixty three squares, with all the symbolical meanings that go with this, were designed. It wasn’t possible to move one painting, or it would have broken the harmony and meaning of the whole. Still, the same preoccupations were at the core of it all:

• It was important to adapt to the game itself
• It was important to adapt to the subject ??? sens en français???
• I had to open up to volume, with the final sculpture, and to work in team.

To sum up:

• Painting is a job
• The way I chose is far from the usual commercial type of painting, with its exhibitions in galleries and paintings designed as decorations – or the official and institutional art, like contemporary or conceptual art, with its nihilistic immoderate ego. I follow an independent path which, in the light of my analysis of the permanent traits of art over a period of 50,000 years, seems to me the only path that will in the future give back to art its real place. This independence has its drawbacks, for it means my work isn’t recognised by insitutions or trade. This is my current handicap which, I’m sure, will turn out to be my force in the longer term. This choice has only been posible thanks to the public who has been supporting me in my endeavours, and has helped me advance, for these last twenty years.
• Technique, far from being an obstacle, actually greatly helps creation. I chose a glazing technique.
• The problem of art is eschatological.
• Western art is figurative, not realistic.
• I try to integrate few moods or anedoctical expressions.
• I strive to work on universal themes.
• I want to create “ensembles”, wholes, created globally, and where each painting is an element of a whole, linked to one single being like organs in a body, where volumes, decorative aspects and other arts participate and have a real function.
• Therefore I need to work with other artists specialising in other fields.
• I want to create paintings which physically, plastically concern everybody.
• My belief is that a painting is designed for a place, for a special purpose.
• I therefore deem it necessary to adapt expression to each subject, each place.The painter is at the service of a place and a subject, like the prehistoric painter in the Lascaux caves or the Roman painter when he dedicated himself to the vault of Saint Savin sur Gartempe.

The problem with these four conceptual exhibitions (the Ark, the Virtues, the Gardens, and the Jeu de l’Oie) is that they are ephemeral. A two-week exhibition, then it is dimsntled, and each painting is sold individually, for none of the exhibitions was never sold in its whole, and it is obvious that it can’t remain in this place forever.

Therefore art, to become popular, must become visible to the public again.

To finalise this thought I then decided, with people around me, to create Favolus. It is an endeavour to apply in the long term all the parameters and reflexions I have exposed, and which are the conclusions of 25 years spent being a painter.