It was back in 1982 - I was then a young Arts student in Toulouse - that I got acquainted with the collage technique on large format.
I would tear off big strips of piled posters on the walls of the city, then back in the school painting workshop, I would entirely cover them in thick layers of swirling paint, which inspired by Van Gogh’s style, seemed to bathe that petty material in a new light.
For me, those strokes juxtaposed in large commas were meant to veil an over-informative reality.
Once done, I would tear off the coats of paint, revealing this time, letters and bits of images springing back from a distant past.
Afterwards, I would put those remastered blocks back into the street, I would then glue them onto old advertising boards so as to finally spray paint the blocks with vindicative slogans.
Today, 35 years later, I get back to creating the same type of collages. I named them....
What has really changed in my process is the search for more varied images. I now tear off strips of posters from all around the world.
My idea is to materialise a sort of universal language made of a mixing of several languages, which, in my opinion, represent what we experience everyday that is to say the brutal confrontation of varied worlds.
Today, these posters , gathered during my travels , are enhanced in my workshop in Peyzac le Moustier.
Once the collection is done, I imagine a dialogue between writing and painting, an perfect blend of poetry and artistic expressions.
These works of art, these imaginary maps or islands from another world, are the results of a game between signs and trickles, between flat tints and thin layers of cardboards. They give the aspect of a territory made of multiple bumps and geological stratums overlaying each other.
Similar to a continental drift, these icebergs of a new genre, are floating, lonely, isolated in a limitless space, broken and hurt : they are the orphans of Pangea that once saw them being born.
