A form of art-therapy, SOLSTICE is certainly the most personal work, created most recently while I had just moved temporarily to the city, having left the Camargue at the end of the lockdown. I found a part of a sheet on which I had started to draw and paint a year earlier but which I had abandoned. I wanted to recuperate it without knowing what I was going to do with it. No specific shape or idea in mind, only the desire to use ‘earth’ and ‘sky’ colours and to be led by them. Completely spontaneous and intuitive painting. I discovered that I had created an octopus of some kind and after some research, that it is associated with the summer solstice and the new moon in certain mythology. Indeed it was two days before the solstice so I continued, on the spur of the moment, taking pleasure in my work, using colour according to emotions or appeasement felt in the moment; detaching myself from a representation of a given form of reality. The octopus relates to the sea, to emotions, to fear, to dreams, to astrology, to the more primitive and spontaneous aspect of the child playing with the paintbrush, with textures and who, in spite of himself, expresses himself…The contemplative aspect brings a lightness, a gentleness and that is why I left it free, unattached, to be laid out on the ground or hung.
