Artist's texts & statements
I AM MAKING ART ALIVE IN A SOCIETY WHICH IS SPIRITUALLY DEAD
Works on Paper or the Anti-Paintings
November, 2003
"My drawings are not drawings but documents. You must look at them and understand what's inside..." Antonin Artaud.
"Entanglement means that existing decorations were negligible at the moment of the layout of a new image." "Lascaux" by G. Bataille.
As in each sentence, there is almost always: subject, verb, complement...The artistic language is not an exception to the rule, it is built, structured and perceived in the breadth of all our knowledge and our prejudices-visual, social and cultural. It is therefore essential to destroy and to mistreat these rules and these structures so as to make the artistic language bring back its own essence its own principle, its very substance!
Works on paper are included in the time of the painting process, they stem from chance and encounters with images, colors, variations, transparencies, revolts, poetry and dreams. They are sometimes taken up again after several years of silence, they grow old, they catch a sheen, they destroy themselves by overcharge and sometimes they are revived miraculously. They resemble the geological landscapes-stratified, jostled, assaulted by time. They are never finished, and endlessly metamorphose themselves at the eye of the attentive witness. Images superpose, match each other or annihilate themselves inside of chaotic spaces which endlessly vibrate towards a perpetual destiny.
They exist intrinsically like as many self-portraits, with their real presence-physical, sensual, imaginative, macabre, intellectual, plastic, cultural, mystical, affective, sanguine and libidinous.
They often surprised me because of their outrageous liberty, a bit like sketches that would sleep to the inmost depths of the self and that would rise spontaneously, ephemeral, after winters of larval status. Companions of work, companions of paint, accompanists of life, they pose here the traces and the support of the magical and fairy voyage of the artist.
Desire and the Hurricane
Gallery 138, The Annex, Chelsea, NYC
November 6/December 12, 2002
"I am in every things the desire, in harmony with the cosmic order." Bhagavad Gîtâ.
Desire burns us alive. Nothing could ever be more ambiguous than this fire that destroys our reality as we drown ourself's in another realm. This desire suspended on your lips, like a child lost in the night, it is life and it is death, on the door of the morning of love. This is the end of the flesh, and the sun of the soul. Everything merges, this the fusion, the end and the beginning, sensual memory, sulfurous path and death of time.
Desire blind ours eyes. Nothing matters anymore than the curves of your hips, and the warmth and darkness of your womb, a secure place from which I will always be reborn, like a bird, like a tree, a pure spirit.
This is the archaic desire, the one that nourishes life, every day, every night, and even in between. It is crossing every thing, like water and wind. It is the breath of eternity which is here, there, before and after us.
This is desire, the big thief of the self. Inhabiting me, stilling my brain, my will and my power. Every hour he is there, killing my loneliness and exploding it into a myriad of stars all over inside of my body, like a new blood, a new flesh, a new hope.
Jean-Pierre Sergent about Mayan Diary Painting Installation
Taller Boricua Gallery, New York City
April/May, 2002
The theme of Mayan culture actually encompasses primitive culture in general, rather than an ethnic group in particular. Even so I find the Mayan imagery highly sensual and spiritual, as it remind's me of the lost paradises dreamt by Gauguin.
Painting is a conveyor of life experiences. One can feel that it expresses the primary energy of life, the color of blood, the strength to stand up, the negation of death, the warm softness of the womb and the near alienation from sexual desire. In that way art is related to desire; it is stronger than the mind, and outlast individual destiny.
The main image is of the Mayan corn-god Wak-Chan-Ahaw. The god that made everything happen, created the universe, and fertilized the world. He is dressed, or undressed, by two beautiful nude women, mothers-lovers-goddesses who, through their gestural offerings, bring him back to life to germination. This image is a metaphor for the human soul's resurrection from an underworld journey after defeating the Lords of death. This scene, from Mayan mythology, takes place on the first day of creation, under water, in the primordial sea. It has a very strong relationship to cosmogony and the human unconscious. The second Mayan image is of the voluptuous Dragon Lady. She seduced one of the principal deities of Xibalbà, the Maya land of the dead, whose power and reputation are comparable to Hades of the Greeks, or Pluto of the Romans. I had encountered those female energies during one of my shamanic journey's. The four small prints are homage to their beauty and their wonderful attractive and healing spirits. The light which emanates from them symbolizes the light they were bathing in as they came to me. On my right shoulder was the Yellow Lady, on my right leg the Red Lady, on my left leg the Black Lady, and on my left shoulder the Blue Lady.
Art or shamanism aren't as important, what is important is life in every shape at every moment. Art, shamanism or even sexuality can serve as a path to better understand the mysteries of creation. Sexual trances can be as powerful as shamanic trances, because during both trances we use different parts of the brain. We experience a change in the body's gravity center, and an alteration of the self. We feel, at that time, an incredible rise in cosmic energy, as well as a strong connection with every being; plants, animals, earth, or the sun. This way of being reconnected is essential. It teaches us love, compassion and give us an idea of the infinite traveling paths of souls in other dimensions.
Painting speaks for what it is : memories, raw spectacle, visual pleasure and pure emotion. Let love and death be the only true eternal human tragedies.
PLAZA HOTEL
July, 2002, translated by Anita Anand
Beauty is Energy
"With beauty may I walk", "The Night Navajo Chant"
Before money, by inscribing time in history, violently dispossessed us of our happiness, beauty was related to interior time, like an organ, an aura, a cosmic harmony.
Our freedom rests in finding our way back to this cosmic time, the time of yellow and black bees, red ants, ladybugs that spoke to the spirits, golden beetles that are God's messengers, birds of paradise and flowers of exuberant sensuality.
Man had understood this empirically during thousands and thousands of years, because Nature had made Herself beautiful and desirable in order to survive and Man imitated Her.
Beauty is the breath of life, as essential as desire, the only hope of survival in a chaotic and dangerous world. More than an esthetic notion, it is a spiritual value, a tangible way to communicate with the reigning spirits of the visible and invisible world. In this way, every tree leaf is a love song that we must once more learn to listen to.
Bondage and Freedom
June, 2002
"Bondage & freedom" are my for-last prints realized in September 2003 at my Long Island City, New York studio. It is printed mainly in monotype and 10 editions of 5 prints, acrylic silkscreened on Rives B.F.K. paper 10"x10". It have been shown at gallery 138, New York, in November 2005, and also available at my new studio in Besançon, France.
"This magic moment when horrible suffering transforms itself into an ocean of pleasure."
The images of Bondage & Freedom are a perfect metaphor of the current human condition. Man has invented social systems that exceed human measure and crush individuals in an infernal kaleidoscopic spiral. Every human being is a slave, and this outrageous craziness is that of the Marquis de Sade and the French Revolution, when life was so fragile, so violent, so hazardous. It is anti-life, anti-love and the roaring violence of life. The body is tied up: submissive, imprisoned, mutilated in social, monetary, ideological, environmental, terrorist and religious shackles, where the only escape is climax: the transmutation of pain into pleasure.
The images of Bondage & Freedom are also profoundly engraved with the universal human memory of expiatory sacrifice. As within each of us, the memory of a hunter, a cannibal and a sacrificer remain, and what is more violent than to sacrifice woman's beauty to Gods? Contemporary pornography is ritualistic as were the ancient rites performed by the priestesses of Isis, or Dionysus. It is total negation of the ego: the body becomes object, solar and fragmentary explosion like a corpse, meat on a butcher's rack, or fetish... Immersion in the universal, unsaid, unbelonging, lost, magic and the sacred. Systematic fragmentation and annihilation of the seductive image that Woman projects herself when she dominates Man. It is the still dance of the nude body, open, spread out, offered. The skin switching between tears of pleasure and tears of suffering. Orifices filled with the juice of terror and the expectation of fire.
Bondage is a deviation of impotent, childish men who's Persona is subjugated by the unreachable desire of women's sexual climax, satisfaction that they cannot fulfill. It is a pathetic metaphor of human sexual experience. In the place where chauvinist culture does not have the means to satisfy women's desire, men dominate women by humiliating them. Tied, humiliated, tortured and submissive, woman remains beautiful, queenly and serene, and man looks like a stupid lowly butcher, or an executioner from the Middle Ages.
These images have the same religious presence as some western images of Crucifixion. They picture the moment of a vitrified death in an erotic pre-mortem trance, and they have the immanent beauty of the sacred shroud of Turin. Every culture has invented its own violence to heal itself of its great fear of death, desire, absence, departure, impotence and the ephemeral beauty of life.
PLAZA HOTEL
January, 2002
What is remaining from most disappeared societies such as the classical Mayans is the imprint of pleasure and spirituality. Most of those memories came from funerary art entombed with the skeleton of some important rulers, kings or queens. It seems that pleasure is the most regenerating human experience, it has survived millions of years of genetic evolution and several millennium of religious repression. In Mayan art, one can also feel a strong connection with the shamanic experience: the metamorphosis of the human body into an animals spirits or into the spirit of a plant, such as the god of the corn Wak-Chan-Ahaw, those metamorphosis are common to every cultures, such as the Egyptian with their half animals and half human gods, the Greeks with their mythology of the Minotaurs and the centaurs, the paleolithic caves drawings of half man and half bison, etc... All those images are what Jung called universal archetypes. I strongly believe that if those archetype still survive today in the unconscious, they could be a representation of the spiritual self.
The energy and the power of a shamanic trance is an experience beyond the power of every common dreams. I personally experienced such a shamanic metamorphosis, and some of the paintings I will show are a memory of such out of body trances. I strongly believe that contemporary spirituality should strive towards more of those shamanistic practices. Primarily because those trances teach us that every things are connected, every being requires respect, every thing has a meaning and a purpose including our true self's as we all are dependent upon the so called "great spirit", the "anima mundi" or the "red womb of the earth". We can not dissociate one flower from the sun or from butterflies, dolphins, mountains, jaguars, hawks and the human body. Every spirit merges with another. It is pure experience of fusion and love. This strong and humble connection is in total conflict with the pretentious attitude of contemporary man who dissociates and separates all that surrounds him with the help of science, economics, politics and religion. We are experiencing an age of globalization based on a premise that business is the only logical connection between cultures. This expanding state-controlled economy and structure seems to survive from one economic empire to the next. It seems unchallenged except by artists or some indigenous cultures around the world who won't allow their soil to be exploited and their soul to be enslaved by work. Empires inflate themselves as they grow, however there is no room for more expansion on ours planet Earth, neither inside of the human social body, where every human look and act already like a neurotic zombie. So should humanity jump happily into outer space for an other Empire to expand? Alternatively can we go back to some more humanist and reasonable economical systems? A system based on ecology, humility, pleasure, compassion, peace and reciprocity.
One can always dream!
My paintings are germinations, cosmogonies, energy systems, artistic exterminations...
January, 2001, translated by Anita Anand
One must look at my paintings not as paintings, not as art objects, but as some sacred spaces of conflicts and creations. An enclosed, chaotic, ethereal space where several energies mix together, attract each other, harmonize and destroy each other, and transmute into pure energy. My approach is more shamanic than esthetic and more alchemical than philosophical.
I always have been fascinated by painting done on supports other than canvas or wood panels. For example, prehistoric cave paintings, paintings on Greek, Mayan and Moche vases; paintings in Egyptian tombs and sarcophagi, Islamic ceramics, prehistoric Chinese pottery, Aztec and Mayan codices, manuscripts of the Middle Ages, Tibetan mandalas, graffiti quickly written on modern city walls, Indian miniatures, mola blouses of the Kuna Indians of Panama, Tierra del Fuego Selk'man Indian painted body spirits, finger imprints on the mud of the cave ceiling of Pech-Merle, Siberian and American shaman drums, painted loincloths on bark strips of the Mbuti and Mangbetu Pygmies, Japanese shunga on rice paper, magic paintings on Sioux teepees, Australian aboriginal dream maps on bark, sand paintings of the Navajo medicine man, paintings on wooden shields made by the Asmat people of New Guinea, Mexican and Guatemalan ceremonial masks, etc...
I have also been fascinated by painting done before the advent of architecture, for architecture (except that of the ancient Egyptian, Mayan, Greek, Aztec, Inca, Assyrian civilizations, and that of cathedral builders) has completely killed artistic freedom and expression by converting imagery into a window frame, and it has subordinated, constrained and annihilated through its utilitarian and profane function: the mysteries of the unconscious, all kinds of magic, the earth's telluric energies, cosmogonies, the connections womb-dwelling, mythologies, communal social structures, dreams and all the directional spiritual axes. Finally, painting as pictures get me bored and totally alienate me, because it remains a narrow, bourgeois, representational, European and religious way of picturing the world. Let's get rid of the idea of the "painting"!
My work is about beauty, freedom and ecstasy in sexual and in spiritual experience, there in the heart of the scene of creation. The act of ejaculating into the stars and in the warm womb of a woman who is at her climax, in the eye, in the gaze of the cosmos. The beauty of the body of a woman who is sucking a cock while being fucked. The color of pleasure, the juice that runs out of her pussy lips, that door open over the clouds of Baudelaire, Axis Mundi, between yesterday and tomorrow. My only spirituals values: the tone of your skin, the curved shadows of your tits, the irrational blackness of your hairy triangle, the powerful bloody veins of trees and rivers, the subtle impermanence of the wind, the sexual viscosity of the fishes, the crazy swarming of insects, the near death silence of stones, the black and blue shadow of the night, the joyous yellow supernumerary of stars... I am a life and life is light, passionate, violent... Images, colors and forms devour each other, fight each other, love each other, revolt against each other... And somewhere, some kind of shaman with an over powerful heart infiltrates himself; he is here, universal stream of light, and life is infinite and sexed.
Uxmal - New York A Mayan Diary
2000
"When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet, I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains." C.G. Jung.
Uxmal; from those ghostly ruins there still emanates the magic energy of a whole civilization. New York; is where I live, a place that will also become one day, with the perpetual gnawing of time, a faded and forgotten skeleton.
This body of paintings was created in a musical, serial, tonal and repetitive style.
The main image is one of the Mayan corn-god Wak-Chan-Ahaw. The one who made everything happen, who created the universe, and who fertilized the world. He is dressed, or undressed, by two beautiful naked women, mothers-lovers-goddesses who throughout their gestural offerings bring him back to life, to germination. This image is a metaphor for the human soul resurrection from the underworld journey after defeating the Lords of death. This scene from the Mayan mythology takes place on the first day of creation, under water, in the primordial sea, and therefore has a very strong relationship to cosmogonies and the human unconscious.
Some images come from contemporary pornography, also featuring its archetypes of phallic resurrections and germinating offerings. Other images are from shamanic drawings, some are spatial representations of the Axis Mundi, while others are drawing from shamanic journeys I have experienced under hypnosis. There is also some vulvas genetic patterns, and some imprint of classical Mayan vases and ground-stone chisels.
The work is still in process and new images are integrated during the realization of new paintings.
The paintings will be presented side by side; the arrangement of the work will be determined by the configuration of the exhibition space. It would be best to have a wall measuring at least 32 feet long, on which I could install seven paintings to clearly express the cyclic pattern of time.
Indian Names, or liberty before the establishment of the supernumerary laws
"The land, witch had been common to all, like the sun light and the breezes, was now divided up far and wide by boundaries, set by cautious surveyors." The iron age, Ovid, Metamorphoses.
The hue, the spirit, the substantial
Transformation, assimilation
Power, dream, courage
The interconnection of Man, Nature, Culture, and Universe
Force, tenderness, poetry
The violence of life
Identity
The stars and the clouds
Circles, innocence
Liberty before the establishment of the supernumerary laws
Plenitude, freedom, color
An offering
The word without verbs
Object, animal, tree, thunder
Woman, stream, pebbles
Fire, shadow, blood
the womb, the Universe
Text translated by Andrea Meyer
Nomad Territory - from the Circle to the Square
September,1999, translated by Andrea Meyer
"Art, like Architecture, is in a violation of natural space."
Most spaces inhabited by nomadic people are constructed out of a circular form: From the Eskimos Igloos, to the Mongolian Yurt, the North American Indians Tipis, to the Pygmy Huts of Africa...
At the end of this century, we are witnessing the final stages of a settling process, which began 10 000years B-C- and witch has spread across the entire surface of the earth. We are witnessing the mortal agony of hunting and gathering peoples, by converting them no more Into agrarian peoples but into a sort of zombie, incapable of surviving the economic disturbances brought on by financial markets and International Trusts that hope to transform the entire world into "squares heads", and consumers of hamburgers and Coca-cola. We still devastate their land and exploit their resources: Minerals, forests and Livestock. Even worse, we destroy their cultures and beliefs by forcing them to adopt our religion and welcome hordes of tourists.
Nomadic territory are also migratory zones for Whales, Salmon, Pilgrim Falcons, Reindeer from Siberia, Bison and swallows.
"Father, I wish you good health for ever, we will always wander in new places and our reindeer will never die." Siberian song.
The Mirror of Day and Night
"They saw the light and the dark as equal opposite, not simply as light on a background of dark." Art from the Andes, R. Stone Miller.
"Ometecuhtli/Omecihuatl*, he is the mirror of days and nights." M.L. Portilla, Aztec Thought.
Night is only the earth's shadow
The women , Gaia** and Nut***, bring together the rational and irrational
Vulvas, wombs, and stars
Stars, wombs, and vulvas
Life create itself, repeats itself, pushes itself into being
260 days, 260 nights
The sacred observes us
with the balance of an open shell
The house rocks
Night is there, where the earth's shadow rest.
*Ometecuhtli/Omecihuatl: "Lord of the Duality" and argues that Ometeotl was the supreme creator deity of the Aztecs, and that the Aztecs envisioned this deity as a mystical entity with a dual nature akin to the European concept of the trinity.
**Gaia: Her pregnant belly, her miraculous womb emitting life energy and receiving it back at death
***Nut: I am the mistress of the sky and the stars, I am mother of the sun.
Translated by Andrea Meyer
The dream of an imprisoned man
After Giotto, the dream of Innocent III, and Sade, The 120 days of Sodom.
"The occidental man is bewitched, trapped in a state of slavery by the "thousand and one things" that are surrounding him. He sees them one by one, he is imprisoned inside the self and inside the objects, unaware of the deep root of the humane being". C.G. Jung
"One can acquire liberty, but one can never regain it again". J-J Rousseau.
Our societies are prisons
Our religions are prisons
Our work is a prison
Money is a prison
Love is a prison
Dreams are a prison
Sickness is a prison
Desire is a prison
The body is a prison
Death resembles desire
Painting hope water from a spring, from the sea.
Translated by Andrea Meyer
Dionysos, Perpetual Orgy or Organs of Life
Gallery Juno, January 15/February 20, 1999, translated by Andrea Meyer
"It is the world of water, where all life floats in suspension" C.G. JUNG.
- The square space is the womb of dreams.American society transforms its sexual frustration into heightened violence.
- Tantra doctrine, unlike Christianity and Buddhism, integrates sexuality into religion, rather than suppressing the libido in favor of isolation and contemplation.
- Sexuality is a social phenomenon.
- Sexuality is overburdened with sacrality.
- Sexual energy stands in direct opposition to death.
The erotic image never leaves us indifferent; it has a role and a function, hence its attraction, its violence, its perversity. It directly touches the spectator's soul...
The libido represents both freedom and obligation: freedom to act as an individual and obligation to reproduce as a species. Simple pleasure does not exist. Even in De Sade, we recognize the will to destroy the result of pleasure, perhaps here lies the ultimate pleasure?...
Transformation of the subject into object; Man's regression into his primary state - bestial, cannibalistic, naked; dissolution of the self into "the world of water".
Erotic violence is both natural and culturally integrated; Greek vases display this folly, this desire to renew the universe by renewing the self and society in a Dionysian orgy. Orgies have always had a paradisiacal quality, as in Genesis, something prehistoric that disrupts established social boundaries.
Art and Eroticism stand in opposition to society organized around work, thus becoming sulfurous, taboo. The more societies work, the less individuals achieve emotional and sexual climax, and this imbalance lodges itself between conscious reality and subconscious aspiration. Primitive societies do not suffer from this dichotomy, as they knew how to integrate work and sexuality in a natural, mythological and artistic fashion.
Ultimately desire exists only to break the solitude and reintegrate the individual into the human community; the realm of living and sexual beings.
Amana*, Paradise Lost
*"Amana, goddess of water, is a beautiful woman whose elegant form ends in the tail of a serpent, who symbolizes at once time and eternity. She regenerates herself periodically, shedding her skin just like a snake, like the souls of the dead, like the earth itself." M. Eliade
Time devours the present like the son of a ravenous devil
The gods, ruins of humans past, are submerged, forgotten
Each man crushed by the machine remembers,
Dream of nature, beauty, creation...
Civilizations collapse, overlap, become entangled
Empires giving birth to new empires
From nature springs water as if from a womb
Man today is never whole
Between the past and the future he cannot exist
Where does completeness lie?
Text translated by Andrea Meyer
Suspended Time French Institute
Painting is the interrogation of the moment, of time immovable, it's the acid that gnaws at the marrow of our memory, lying there crushed, gaping, exposed. The image is like a tool that pierces, that thrusts its symbols into the heart of personal time. What is stopped is actually to become, the instant repeats itself ad infinitum. The water, the stars, the death, the scripture, the fire... The metamorphosis of an inert image into a magical one. The silence opens up a psychic vacuum, thirsty for life and for blood... Game of exchange, we will become what we have seen...
February 26/October, 1998, translated by Andrea Meyer.
Suspended Time: Painting = Zone of Compression
Documents
The paintings presented at the French Institute/ Alliance Française represent the result of many months of work and reflection. The images were gathered during voyages to natural sites (photos of animals, rivers, plants and old water mill) ; museum visits (Greek statues, the skull of Asmat) ; events (photos of bullfights) ; drawings of hand prints and other symbols; and finally several images taken from books (both cultural and historical): an Indian diagram of the cosmic representation of time, a drawing of the outlines of the prehistoric cave at Pech-Merle, a text by Georges Bataille taken from "The Story of the Eye" and finally a text by Alfred de Musset, taken from "Gamiani."
Execution
The images, which are 42 x 42 inches in size, are silkscreened onto nine 14 x 14 inches Plexiglass panels. These panels are juxtaposed and then surrounded by 14 x 7 inches pieces of Plexiglass x 96 inches.
Concept
My painting space appears like a zone of conflict between different images and texts. The images seem compressed in a flat, enclosed space, behind the surface of the Plexiglass. Many layers of images are printed in different colors on the same panel, thus creating stratifications, a virtual depth, a space in which the spectator has the liberty to travel. At times the images hinder one another, annihilate each other and are metamorphosed into the vague and the chaotic, creating abstract spaces in which only movement and the "coincidentia oppositorum" can survive. The images do not serve as illustration of the text. Neither do the texts illuminate the images.
The installation in the entry way can be interpreted as a pathway, a development, an initiation:
First, the sudden appearance of the verb, energy, creation, symbols, and aesthetic awakening;
And then the appearance of animality with all its confusion, its stammering, its libido, its unconscious, its intimacy;
then the appearance of consciousness of historic time, of death, of disappearance, of absence, of cosmic time, of genetic continuity...
and finally detachment, dreams, take off, contemplation, the informal, the timeless, the place where images are vanishing, serenity, maybe wisdom...
The large piece in the hall may be interpreted in the following way:
The bird of prey is dismantled, and he seems to fall in regard to a central point, thus creating a sacred space with it own points of reference. We might see a reference to the Breugel painting "The Fall of Icarus", we may also feel the influence of the "sand paintings" of the Navajo Indians or maybe Tibetan mandalas. The Bataille's text is depicting the scene were in just a few lines, Simone falls into ecstasy while Granero the bullfighter dies, gored by the bull. The images are like reference point in historic time: a water lily (fragility, vanity, ephemeral beauty suspended between water and sky, the supreme subtlety of nature), a statue of Venus (the perpetuity of art, the presence of the female body as an archetype, the sensuality), an old window (ruin, passage, openings, the construction of man and destruction of time), the execution of the bull (ritual sacrifice in a closed and sacred space, the magical moment in which man appropriates an animal's life), an old water.
Text for the exhibition at the French institute New York, Feb.1998, translated by Andrea Meyer.
Painting = Religious process
Transformation of the object into the subject, desacralization of the subject to transform it into an object.
Consciousness of primary forces: Life, Death, Sexuality, the Unconscious...
Consciousness of secondary forces: Beauty, Lyricism, Poetry, Anxiety. Compression of time, structure, space and spirit.
Opening and dialogue towards another, similar or bestial.
Staging of the work as part of the process of religiosity.
Transcendence of the Ego, of the libido, and all impulses.
The artist is always at the center of the construction/destruction process.
Jean-Pierre Sergent, January 1998
Dancing with Discontinuous Images
February, 1995
During a trip to France last summer, I encountered Georges Bataille's thoughts in his book Eroticism. In this book, Bataille conceptualizes the discontinuity of existence : the fatality of the human being in a perpetual quest for primordial uniqueness, a state accessible only in death or through ritual or erotic trances. This idea influenced the content of my own work which is realized in the assemblage of Plexiglass pieces, fragmentary images of beings or things, arranged in a square format, mounted on a wall, creating a complete and flowing work. This format of display allows the continuity of space and time to be restored, bringing the spectator to new non-linear spaces.
My search, like Bataille's, is also centered on one question : how to live today in a society which is devoid of spirituality and has lost any sense of sacred, a society that is essentially sacrilegious? I draw my inspiration from history, daily news and my own experience. I choose images, gestures and symbols which resonate beyond concrete and materiel reality. Whether the significations of my work are sacred or profane does not matter, as long as the images convey some meaning or power. In my work, given my vision and goals, I necessarily incorporate images of the taboo, the forbidden, the violent or the erotic. Many of the images I am drawn to have been suppressed, even banned, from various societies at certain times, and then accepted or widely diffused in other times and places.
The more I reflect on what the artistic process should be, the more I think I should move towards Mircéa Eliade's idea... "All creation implies a superabundance of reality, that is to say eruption of the sacred in the world".