I categorize painting into two parts: one, as a medium used in art, and the other, painting that exists by itself, which is artisanal and whose importance lies in the act itself. The painting that exists by itself, which I would call artisanal painting, seems devoid of meaning because it lacks the overflowing discourse of art painting. It does not serve as a tool to communicate an idea but as a tool for discovery. What seems meaningless to us is usually just an object to which no importance has been given, lacking any cultural or intellectual connotation. But every image with an attached meaning originates from a first visualization where it still seemed meaningless. Painting serves to integrate and expand the field of culture by adapting new elements. These new elements cannot come from photographs but must come from observation or imagination, so as not to be tainted by a vision that is not our own.

The minor genres, defined by academic painting and which, despite a feeling of ultimate liberation, still prevail today, are not devoid of meaning. A bouquet of flowers has no less meaning than a landscape or a history painting. Its “meaninglessness” stems from a lack of empathy and connection to the living world, as well as a completely anthropocentric culture. A viewer will always seek in a painting the references that reassure them, the cultural elements that are part of their knowledge. It is difficult for a viewer to understand a “culture of the non-human living” for which there is no vocabulary, language, or even idea. The image that is painting is a way to approach and feel the complexity of something that cannot be understood.

Landscape painting. Still life. Empty space, hollow of any human habitation. Painting in general, figurative, the true vision of the painter’s world. One not touched by the photographic lens. The eye that invents, that creates disproportionate correlations between things. The painter takes his path, in a network without boundaries, just a vague trace in the grass, broken branches, and a more or less well-made marker. And he follows the trace without being certain of the rightness of the chosen path, constantly fleeing the anxiety of being lost. Because he is not lost, he sees the invisible path. He places the elements gropingly in the dark, brush forward to avoid bumping into anything. His path is wild, non-existent, just like his reasoning. For it has not yet been fixed. It has never existed, yet here it is drawn on the canvas. The painter paints his truth, which he wishes to be that of others. The image of the paved path is that favored by the moderns. Hard, traced, and resistant, it lends its back to any artist wanting to borrow its images. At the edge of the road, small deviations reveal themselves as lines of desire; they sought to leave the road but are attached to it by conviction. But at the end, we see the dead-end, a wall, walls surrounding the end of the road. It seems far away. We are tired of seeing our feet advance step by step on black asphalt, bored by the little-changing grey sky. For too long, we were made to believe this path was the best because it was easy, stable, and constant. Always moving forward towards who-knows-what, but always forward. Constant progress has forbidden us to love wandering. Because that meant stopping, moving away, or even retreating. We have been on it so long that the edges are impassable. It is then up to artists and, I believe, especially painters, to mark another path. To imagine it, to see it, and to trust it. To be not post-modern but non-modern. I feel this excitement within me. Having glimpsed a hole, an absence of underbrush that I can cultivate in oscillating back and forth. Because with each painting, I dream myself a little farther.

The idyll, the pastoral. Landscapes whose realism or beauty is not assumed. Empty or populated landscapes, which in painting have changed little since their existence and which were profoundly shaken at the time Otto Dix made his last landscape paintings. War, horror, and a deep questioning of where art can go after this upheaval have distanced us from idealized art. It has become kitsch, outdated, disconnected. Yet the living world has changed little. The trees are the same, the flowers as well, and the sky renews its daily spectacle infinitely since eternity. Is it guilt over the uglification of the world and the disappearance of biodiversity that makes us ashamed? That makes us believe that this is the ideal and not reality and pushes us to look away? I will always remember the former director of fine arts telling me my tree was not very contemporary. One might think that a contemporary tree should not be sublimated, to flatter it, to open the viewer’s eyes by making them observe the real tree the same way they appreciate picturesque painting (not appreciating the picturesque is certainly snobbery). One might think that a contemporary tree should be relativized, be a mere decor. Brueghel the Elder makes the viewer understand the beauty of a tree in winter. He paints them as if translating them into what speaks to humans. That is, motif and repetition.

If there are characters, fragments of history, nods to old painting in my works, it is not to distract attention from the bouquet — it is so that one truly sees it. The bouquet, the plant, the sky, the fruit: all that has no voice, all that has no clear function in language. I build around to support their silence, so that their presence is felt differently. The bouquet is not empty. It is saturated. With images, memory, forgotten gestures, care given, human expectations projected. It is charged. But to listen to it, one must sometimes set a stage. One must tell a story around it. The so-called minor elements are not minor. They are simply less easy to interpret. They require slowing down, observing, feeling. Shifting a little. Accepting that there is something looking at us, but that we do not understand. That is why I do not paint from photographs. The photo freezes a gaze already cast. I seek to put myself in the place of what does not look like us. And for that, one must paint with the body, with time. One must imagine what one cannot know. One must, perhaps, love blindly.

So I paint bouquets like one writes poems. With characters, silences, paths. But it is always towards them that everything returns. It is they who contain the world. Let us cultivate the images we would like to harvest.

When there is no word for an element of life, an abstract, elusive thing but felt, it must be described in the unsaid. The explanation is done as one explains an existing word, with everything around it, the negative form. Poetry, the blur in narrative, essentially the association of two elements foreign to the two poles of our unsaid, aim to make the viewer feel and see the shadow of this thing for which there is no word. When I paint, I explain, as best I can, things unknown to both language and image. It exists in the minds of those who know how to feel it. In distress of words but in love of the unknown, one juggles with saying and silence, sense and absurdity.

I distinguish Painting from Art not to oppose them, but to underline that painting, as an inheritance of an ancient craft, follows its own path. It is not “outside” of art, neither below nor above. It works differently. It progresses by gestures, by slowness, in a physical, intuitive, often silent relationship to the world. It does not seek to make a statement. It demonstrates nothing. It does. And in this doing, it discovers. It is not a weakness, it is not a refusal of intelligence, it is another way of thinking — with the hand, with the eye, with focused attention. Where Art sometimes projects itself as a declaration, artisanal painting inscribes itself in the continuity of matter, image, transmission through forms. It is not nostalgia. It is fidelity. And trust in a form of slow, non-spectacular elaboration that needs no other justification than itself. This is precisely what makes the so-called minor genres so powerful. Flowers, fruits, branches, skies — these simple forms, often relegated to decoration or secondary status, reveal with even greater force the essential nature of painting: that of an act. Because without imposed narration, without explicit message, it is the gesture itself that carries the image. To paint a bouquet is to affirm that it deserves to be seen, that it deserves to remain. It extracts it from the flow of the everyday to give it status, form, memory. Painting shows, but above all: it gives to endure. What is painted, even if it has no story, enters into a form of long time. It becomes a reference not because it was important, but because time was taken to look at it.

Translated with ChatGPT