Smile when you fall

Work: Smile when you fall

Acrylic paintings on canvas, 100 x 100 cm

Location:

Montpellier, Bouchindhomme Gallery, France, March/April 2023

Reference text:

We’re not going to lie, the current mood is heavy, even leaden. That’s what I was thinking not long ago as I began this new series of works in the summer studio generously made available to me by my friend Dominique, while a sun of the same metal crashed down on my shoulders, dragging the whole planet with it: wars, nuclear threats, pandemics, species extinction, economic crisis, inflation, global warming…
It’s hard for a supposedly sensitive artist to come up with something that makes sense, to reflect the world as it is by building a mental bubble of coolness as far away from the tumult as it is from the air-conditioning.
How, then, can we avoid getting bogged down in the victimhood of the ten plagues of Egypt, or, above all, admit that we’d have to be very pretentious to believe that my creations could have a significant impact on the course of things?
And yet, if I imagined this series as a last Californian sunset, precisely on the evening when David Lynch would chat with Marshall Mac Luhan just before the Big One, this succession of canvases in saturated colors nonetheless carries a message: that of a hope placed in my medium.
It’s true: I can’t do anything about the earthquakes that threaten us. But at least I’m lucky enough to have the materiality of paint to hold on to.
And this series is the very opposite of a manifestation of despair: it’s a declaration of love to Matisse, Delaunay, Pollock, Blanchard, Haring, Basquiat, Munch – in short, to all those who opened up the colorful path that allows me to cross life under a starry sky that will never fall on me. »