My painting will always remain for me a scene from which a soft violence, an implicit, latent struggle between material and form flows.

I examine the possibilities offered by the materials,  what they carry in themselves, that which crimson itself suggests, that which a specific texture whispers. Then I bring them to life on a canvas and give them a form according to an order which is coherent only to myself and my creative logicality. But such an insertion of form into material cannot take place without some sort of brute force since I impose something new upon something undetermined. I ask it to be what I want it to be, I do not allow it to remain ‘intentional material’, I force it to become true to my wishes. Of course, while I am painting I remain alert to the suggestions of the materials, exactly as bronze suggested to sculptors that they reproduce a heroic being, a god. So there is this first duality: what the material tells me on the one hand and what I decide to create from these powers on the other, a first quasi-schizoid struggle. As it happens, this ‘clash’, this excitement does not end with my work on the canvas; the struggle is an endless one in an enrobed fashion. “Old Tapestries” (oil painting, 2002) is not fixed: I want it to continue to be bright and dynamic. In a way, it is some sort of independence which I desire for my completed paintings, or a substantially autocratic ontology if, at any given moment, I dare to embrace this pretension. Indeed if, dramatically, my skill does not match my expectations it attempts and always will attempt to strive towards this purpose.

I chose abstraction in order to offer in the best way I could what Kandinsky called the ‘internal resonance’ of the artist. I am looking to communicate a sincerity that is as personal and raw as possible. I try to transmit a message that characterises myself, one that only makes sense because it is mine. It is not an ego-centricity but rather an ego-theoria: an ‘I’ that is out to be seen, that launches itself beyond itself in an unusual configuration. It confesses, with some danger, to being something which of itself it is not. It is a project of intimacy which, to refer back to the the Zao Wou-Ki quotation with which I open my book, is realistic to me.

I evidently rely much on colours, the significance of which, in terms of warmth and coldness, I distort with different mixtures. The heat of red will incarnate the sharp coldness of geometric contours: blue will become the heat of a vital animation. Again, I sometimes try to use a filter that resonates like an old springtime resulting in a second web of meaning above the colours. All this is a way of combatting the materials which leads me, for instance, to extract from the vermilion magma of “The Way to Happiness” a glacial firework. I try to work with depth, with different layers so as to avoid a space of only two dimensions where the form would not enjoy a truly integral freedom but remains half smothered. For me the aim is to optimise expression across a range which is restrained as little as possible.The loss of representational elements was an essential step that I regard as a release from a chain. I am not making a case against the use of representational elements, I simply do not find that mode of expression satisfactory.

I will not linger on introspective comments in the hope that my work will refer, as Le Clezio said, to its transcendence and thus even to its own death. In my opinion, the message is no longer present in the painting when one’s gaze comes to rest on it; it is already adapting to and integrating itself within the psyche of the spectator, integrating its own story, its own memory and in the end, its own personal perspective. And even if there are as many canvasses as viewings of them, I search for and will always search for the most propitious way to seize the subjective: that which is peculiar to the spectator.