The beginning… Before what? The poetry discovered with Baudelaire placed on a shelf, discovered with Eluard - “Capitale de la douleur” placed against the window glass by Anna Karina in the movie “Alphaville“ (J.L.Godard)… The image, yes, the one that jumps 24 times a second. Through there enters the light. The knowledge. The discovery of subjective objectives, illuminations, of filmed gestures, of unframed frames, of people, and others. And then it's a world to be taken as it is, as it is observed through these lenses. The poetry seen, yes.

And then a sketchbook, a pencil... Knowing that my father had been there. And so, a long way ... Very slow. To see, without understanding everything. To wipe off your bare feet, and enter this dark room, full of distant headlights, which illuminate stories and museums, Without seeing everything. We apply ourselves. We try everything, roughly. To see, the initiation. The canvas is free of its possibilities. I don't know… Or I know only too well.

The profession of painter is similar to that of taxi driver. As with his therapist, there is also the bench on which we sit, to talk (or not) with a person behind us. The painter also has a voice behind him, or rather a presence, which can be in his silence but which is there! The moment of artistic creation is a moment of encounter with oneself, but which heightens an awareness of presences, of the ghosts of the studio. When painting, during these privileged moments, this invisible presence is the real creator. The painter being only the instrument. It's a two-man job, on board, one in front, at the controls of the tool, and then behind ... the invisible.
   Let's talk about painting. Let's talk about the paint job first. I paint on the ground, with pigments and a fairly liquid acrylic paint. Describing painting other than by its constituent materials is a risky exercise. The risk being to screen the painting with words. But it is necessary to support visual reproductions of paintings, which are necessarily reductive. I would say then that my painting comes from the earth. A painting produced in the original organic magma. A birth from the raw elements, which nourishes the possibility of a new and fragile universe, but also fertile. As André Malraux says in his “Antimémoires“, « the world of art is not that of immortality, it is that of metamorphosis ». This metamorphosis is what I'm trying to paint. This tries to shed light on the painter's path, without explaining or justifying anything. The journey is not the result of a desire to build a "work", but much more the work of an unconscious revealed by painting. So we can see mineral bodies enclosed in the frame. We can see a transformation, a plant mutation in a pictorial ecosystem, sometimes arid, or on the contrary luxuriant. Organic. Over time. Slow disintegration of certainties, disorientation, erasure-appearance.
   And then around 2010, a radical choice of composition with simple elements. Mutation to an elementary form. These oval shapes like mono-cellular life points. These points which relate to the organic past, but form a single being entirely shattered by small "off-scale" plots. Each painting is a plot. The whole being will be seen later, perhaps, from further away. You have to move away to see. As one embraces a landscape. We are all ten thousand years old, we know it, we forgot it, and I want to swim backwards to visit this painted cave. Rediscover cell-memory, disembodied biology.
   And then 2020, change everything! Your world is crumbling. Small mobile creatures, the Angels. Motionless stones. Dark thoughts emerging from the darkness of cellular and artificial dreams. Without chemistry, just the imagination behind the thought. From the neo-acetyledominative body of our unconscious, plasticized by years of implacable logic of the network router to the architecture based on the datagram. I want to understand, I don't want to understand. I don't explain anything. I just want to be free to see, without seeing.
R.P. 2021