The landscape is the third subject that I treat in painting.
This series of paintings is a work that I started in May 2022 at the residency “Echangeur22” based in Saint-Laurent-des-Arbres, in South of France. But I place the beginning of it two months earlier, in the Netherlands...
Surprised and seduced by the expanses without relief and radically arranged, rhythmic and structured of the Dutch landscape, I took piectures. After I draw on it digitally to spontaneously underline this underlying construction specific to this territory.
However, back in the Cévennes lands (French national park where I live), having taken pleasure to travel and happy wanderings, I found myself unable to reproduce the process experienced before in Netherlands : too many valleys, winding roads, condensed spaces... impossible to synthesised this landscape only by a set of rectilinear lines.
In residence at Echangeur22 I discovered Saint-Laurent-des-Arbres. Stopped on a path between a row of pines and vines, a new protocol imposed itself.
It inevitably begins with a walk that I document through photography.
Back in the studio, the work is organized around a restitution of the perception of space through digital photomontage.
Subsequently, I proceed to a graphic synthesis of the image obtained by redrawing it digitally. It is on this work of transcription of the territory that the painting can then be realized.
This artwork I paint spontaneously on the ground, sitting on the canvas, immersed in the landscape.
This artistic work would not exist without two main inspirations. The first, my interest in the ideographic writing system which led me to calligraphy. I kept the importance of line and gesture. The second is Aboriginal painting. I had the opportunity on several occasions to observe the aborigines painting. I kept the fact of painting on the canvas directly on the ground, and not worrying about the size or the orientation of the elements.
This painting is special in my work because it is the only one to be made from a place that no longer exists. This is my childhood home. This house was given by my grandmother to my parents when I was born. As a child, when I arrived by the narrow path lined with huge blue orthensias, I had the impression of entering a magical space. When my parents separated, the orthensias wilted and then disappeared. When my father got together with another woman, they destroyed the house to build a more modern one. Then, a year after my father passed away, the house had to be sold. A month after signing the sale, I made this painting.
The large dimension of the canvas has a purpose: to make the viewer feel as small as a child, and to fascinate him with these intense colors. There is a term in Japanese which has no equivalent in English but which can be translated as "happy nostalgia".
