Everything begins with a travel : a departure, an exile, an uprooting.
I left France at the age of three, and I would leave Australia seven years later.
Australia: land of Aboriginal peoples, eternal travelers who cross the continent singing the Songlines — nomadic landmarks that tell the story of creation.

Every movement through space is also a movement through time, as Lévi-Strauss reminds us. Each journey is a passage towards another age of the world, another way of inhabiting the Earth.

This displacement is also mine, through painting: a journey towards an inner dwelling, rekindling the memory of a lost territory where Nature is power and wisdom, where the human being knows that he belongs to the living world and is not solely spirit.

At the end of this journey, the aim is to show — and perhaps to share — a certain way of being-in-the-world.

To conceive of travel as the paradoxical experience of the motionless traveler, endlessly engraving furrows on the white page — in search of the Living that we ceaselessly manifest.

Color comes first. The painting is, at the outset, a work without any discernible figure. Color has its own materiality. It is the matrix of the work, the point of departure — a long succession of “sedimentary layers” of oil pastel laid upon the flat surface of the paper. Color is raw matter, kneaded and spread by hand. It is silt, the place of the living, the place of transformation.

Then comes engraving — a large drawn work, graphic in nature, in which the hand extends into a tool. As with Élise Peroi, it is about becoming aware of “the poetic dimension of the gesture”, the dignity of the hand, and all that precedes the making of the work. Working to the rhythm of breath and shaping by hand.

It is an encounter with time. In the silence of a meditative writing, a path unfolds in search of the living. Through the iteration of a single movement, stroke after stroke, I seek to reveal the essence of Nature and our deep connection with it.

The color, concealed between two sheets, becomes the site of the mystery of creation, while the gesture digs into the pristine white of the paper. An obstinate, unceasing, meticulous tracing — a quasi-ritual of intimate rhythms and pulsations that echo those of the living.

The pieces come to life when I separate the two sheets in a final gesture that peels them apart. It is the moment of revelation — also the fruit of chance: now repentance is impossible and letting go becomes essential.

This process of creation is almost as essential as the drawing that results from it.

The final work resembles what is today called contemporary drawing. It sometimes takes the form of a single motif, but also appears as a diptych or triptych. At times, it becomes an object — a stele.

The viewer is invited to travel, to bear witness to stories — to sediments of stories, to stories sedimented over time. To a story that has come into being, and one still in becoming. Subtle, final, the suggestion of a passage: a trace still struggling to tell its tale. A frozen, fossilized testimony, yet an eternal acknowledgment of an original principle, of a humble and sincere quest for objective subjectivity.