Painting techniques

Sometimes, I paint with colour first and then with black. Sometimes it is the other way round. Sometimes, I start from nothing, without knowing how it is going to end up. And sometimes I have a little idea of what I want to do. When I want to enlarge a drawing I do not use squaring up techniques. It gets bigger by itself. I also use collage that are included in the composition. Concerning the colours, I have a greater choice now, for my first canvases I was painting with colours only available at the Art Academy

I do not follow any rule. It all depends. I have been taken in by the black, and now, when I turn to black it is finely drawn. The text or poem that comes with the painting is written afterwards. At the beginning, I was using purer and simpler forms, and little by little it became full of detail. Actually it depends, I painted smaller pastels, and crazy lingerie, it’s completely baroque, with knights and triangular Middle-Ages kings. Acrylic was invented to render the watercolor effect on a greater scale, but you need to paint quickly. I also paint geometrical forms and underline them with black. To get any real work done you have to hole yourself up, it’s sad but true.

Subjects

The different subjects I choose express my freedom: classical subjects such as portraits, battles, bestiaries, landscapes, or settings, and “genre scenes”. In my opinion, everything triggers the imagination: it can be a woman, a historical topic or current events, a setting, an animal or an “unclassifiable” scene, that sprung up from my unconsciousness.

There are some paintings which I improvise without having a preliminary subject, and others in which I express a matured idea. It happens that I start with an idea, and eventually my hand carries me somewhere else.

I had a lot of “theme” exhibitions. At first, it was Yvon Lambert, my gallery in the 1980s, who suggested some subjects, and I was really interested to explore into depth themes like the bestiary, the Louvre masterpieces, portraits, the Trojan war, the “saints”. I continued these theme exhibitions with a tribute to Toulouse Lautrec shown in Albi, a tribute to Brassens shown in my hometown Sète, and an exhibition on Music held in the Fondation Coprim in Paris. In 2007 I produced an exhibition on cinema in Cannes. In 2010, I became interested in Milton’s Lost Paradise and ended up with the exhibition “Sans filet, les Goulamas dans le trou”, which focused on the theme of the Fall.