Thanks to support from the Fondation des Artistes and the French Ministry of Culture, I have been able to create a new series of paintings exploring and reorienting the universal archetypes that are concealed in the visual and material legacies of our collective history. Considering the legend of the emperor Nero who played the fiddle as Rome burned, I directed my “excavations” within the archives of the prints and photography department of the National Library of France, with an emphasis on historical images of recreation opposed to visions of calamity - in order to reveal the paradoxes of contemporary society.
I am able to achieve the associative and freeform quality of collage on the scale of large paintings on canvas. Much as a deejay remixes music, this manner of working permits me to take a medium that is typically static and homogenous and essentially recombine a diverse set of images, grounds and marks.
The “canvas-collages” are a hybrid form of painting on which different ideas, textures, and types of images converge by a common thread.
One can argue that the collective unconscious is housed in society’s discarded images. New memories are created by up-cycling old ones, pieced back together in a game of free association. Clinical studies reveal that the mind’s eye behaves similarly while dreaming. The photographs sourced as a starting point for certain paintings are subsequently reoriented during the production phase of my “canvas collages” whose technique had been developed during my residency at the Cité des Arts, between 2017 and 2019. Paintings on canvas are meticulously “customized” with the help of a sewing machine. The raw linen used as base-support is augmented with the help of fashion and upholstery textiles and photographic prints on fabric. The stitch is more than a manner of binding fabric, the stitch allows dissonant image pairings, simultaneously serving as a frontier and bridge.
Considering the legend of the emperor Nero who played the fiddle as Rome burned, I directed my “excavations” with an emphasis on historical images of recreation opposed to visions of calamity - in order to reveal the paradoxes of contemporary society.
This series was designed and created in a former theater chair factory dating from the 19th century. In the 1970s it became the home and office of Bénédicte Pesle, visionary collector, talent scout, and agent for avant-garde American artists - including Bob Wilson, Merce Cunningham, who rehearsed often in the studio.
Painting is almost exclusively an additive process. By using sodium hypochlorite I can remove the color from dyed denim.
