TIME: A SERIES OF DISCOVERIES... AN INITIAL STREAM
OF THOUGHT... While watching time passing
by and at work on it, the wall seems to be telling a story. At first a plain
surface, time ceaselessly alters it as soon as it is abandoned. The wall keeps
changing, peels off. Shapes and colours appear then fade away. Scratches, impressions
of uneven surfaces, disintegration of the matter, marks, prints, bits of writing,
colours surfacing... these various transient reactions are the source of my
research, of my thinking, of my pictural approach. Fascinated by the continuous
changes of matter and colours, I get myself steeped into those places of abandonment,
of degradation to get to the core of a photographic activity : they represent
what my paintings actually refer to. Still pondering over time, I decide to
explore the colourful area of rust. From twenty-eight samples of metallic oxydes,
I start gradually making mine a whole palette of earth colours, from the darkest
browns to the brightest ochres...
MATERIALS and TECHNIQUES... Whether
it remains opaque, glazed or covered with writing, the paper divides, sticks
to my canvas and plays a major role in my work. As a material fraught with time,
paper is a cultural, symbolic and aesthetic visible sign. Pure or diluted inks,
acrylics, binders, varnish, mediums, papers pasted to canvas... I let several
interconnected materials and techniques interact so as to explore new transient
and aesthetic spaces, between Colour and Texture, Opaque and Transparent surfaces.
... Mixed materials and domains which allow me to compose rythmic spaces in
which matter and colour invent their own directions for themselves as if to
reveal blurred atmospheres between the Earth and the Sky...
DESERT SPACES... Through
my travel experiences and meeting people, my work has taken inspiration from
emotional and aesthetic variations... I am mostly fond of those vast expanses
of desert which inspire my work and tell about an arid land where Colours, Earth
and Space tend to merge. Each of my works is at heart a revisited exploration...
Shapes, signs, pieces of writing then suddenly come to the surface as a kind
of rupestrian exploration... as some memory...
WRITINGS... Old
papers, literature excerpts, musical scores, writings brought back from my many
trips... Writing plays a major role in my work. The word merges with colour
and material to build up spaces of creation, spaces for travelling and coloured
atmospheres. Writing on paper carries along with it a memory, then it is pasted
on the canvas and connects to diluted inks and acrylics. Either readable or
unreadable, the Word is in itself a kind of statement altogether cultural, temporal
and aesthetic in the same way as colour, shape or matter. Often, writing appears
in different languages when we move from one fragment to the next on the same
painting as if to disclose an open vision of the world, beyond the lines, beyond
borders. Born in France but of Portuguese origin, I have always had a taste
and passion for travelling, especially to multicultural and multilingual lands...
Language is the best tool for communication in our modern world and an excellent
vehicle for the freedom of expression and integration.
|