What if we could repeat the new?
Self-Portrait 20.11, 2020
To program the emergence of the incalculable, diligently, is what drives me when I draw.
What are we going to get today?
Without losing my soul, my unity.
Because these days, the unexpected has become rare.
It doesn’t come easily. The predictable has infested every part of our lives.
“Here’s what the client expects. Get to work.”
Everything has already been decided in advance.
When did artists start telling themselves: hey, this drawing is popular, it sells, so I’m just going to do this for the rest of my life!
It’ll be my trademark.
We all have our obsessions, forms that haunt us. But repeating them without the unexpected, just to avoid displeasing people, is sad.
What I like is being able to remain myself without knowing what is going to appear.
To establish rules solid enough not to lose myself, but open enough to let in something I hadn’t anticipated.
Programming, then.
But programming the incalculable.
So what are we really afraid of?
Making something ugly?
Our taste for the predictable may come from our attachment to beauty.
We are all more or less tempted to repeat what we find beautiful.
To me, beauty is something very simple: it is what is there, alive.
Anything that possesses the qualities necessary to be there, without any moral judgement, is beautiful.
A face, an interior, a composition, a spider… things some people might find hideous are beautiful to me simply because they are there.
If I had to establish a scale of beauty, I would rather speak of degrees of structure.
There are very strong structures, highly symmetrical, solid. They are beautiful because they seem the most capable of resisting their own disappearance.
And then there are the others.
Untitled, 2021
Less solid, flawed, with points of fragility. Poor, sick, different, more likely to break and disappear sooner. Plenty of people will find them pretty damn ugly for all those reasons.
I love them even more.
I find them even more beautiful because they hold on.
They struggle, go through hell, repair themselves and survive.
Their presence is intensified by their suffering and their hope.
We live in a world that tries to remove weak structures from sight and favour strong ones.
Perhaps that’s only natural. A survival instinct. We all want to hold on for as long as possible with the best structure we can get.
So we are fascinated by solid structures, with harmonious colours, structures that can reproduce themselves identically, without the unexpected, and that seem — though it is an illusion — to carry an endless life within them.
We want to multiply them. Reproduce them. Avoid the accident.
That is what profoundly bores me.
Often, after making a solid, symmetrical drawing, I need to produce weak structures.
By hand, dirty, messy, untitled.
On an impulse, or with some leftover paint.
On an impulse, or with some leftover paint.
Untitled, in English.
That’s their name.
The counterpart to the Self-Portraits.
I also like “untitled” in the sense of having no rank, no name, no family.
I keep them off social media because I know they will be liked less. Or too much.
Next to my Self-Portraits, they are like the sound of chalk scraping across a blackboard.
But it breaks my heart to cast them aside.
Just as it annoys me to have to choose the right Self-Portraits, the ones that look good together, in order to show them.
Nothing can really remain in harmony over years, or even days or hours, because my state is constantly changing.
The colour of our feelings can fade in a fraction of a second.
I admit that their dissonances can be hard on the eyes.
But at least the Untitled completely satisfy my thirst for the unexpected.
Untitled, 2021