Painting after Deconstruction
Mythologies
What is a mythological scene today, and how can it be represented?
Today’s mythology is a mythology of paparazzi and celebrity magazines. The ancient gods have been replaced by media figures.
How can these mythological scenes be represented?
In the history of art, a form developed in the 1970s: installation. An installation is a three-dimensional visual artwork created for or adapted to a specific site, “in situ”, and often conceived to alter the perception of space or create an environment.
I therefore painted canvases on conventional stretchers, but hang them on the wall as an installation: I completely cover one wall or all the walls of a space. Each canvas has artistic status only as part of the whole. The operation here is covering, like wallpaper or carpet, but with painted canvases.
COVERING
Still Lifes
What is a still life today, and how can it be represented?
A still life today is naturally an object from everyday life; today, these objects are all manufactured. What interests me in these objects is not their intrinsic value, but the emotional relationship I can have with them through their use. For example, Cérébos salt, or the little boy throwing salt on a pigeon’s tail, fascinated me when I was a child.
How can a still life be represented?
Still life is at the origin of my work. At the time, in the 1980s, I was not asking this precise question, but rather this one:
How can I paint today while integrating into my work the important artists of the 20th century who did not make paintings, but explored the visual arts in other ways?
Because my work always contains a reference to the history of art.
I eventually came to think that painting generally uses two objects or materials: the stretcher and the canvas. After an important work by Daniel Dezeuze in which the stretcher becomes the subject of the work through the transparency of the plastic canvas, it seemed important to me to give the stretcher greater value. To give it a particular presence, I gave it the volume of the object represented. As for the canvas, after seeing works by Beuys in which felt is shown as such, without even being worked, it seemed essential to give this canvas two statuses: its conventional role as a support for painting, but also to show it as raw material. I therefore built a stretcher to the scale of the object represented and covered it with sewn canvas. Once it was hung on the wall, I painted only the surface parallel to the wall and facing the viewer.
VOLUME
Religious Scenes
What is a religious scene today, and how can it be represented?
Religions are little practiced, yet they are highly visible in the media, mainly through murders and attacks. Religious images today are therefore images of violence.
How can this religious scene be represented?
My work always contains a reference to the history of art, and in the history of art, what is emblematic of the religious scene is the icon. Icons are paintings of figures on wood; the background is not painted but covered with gold leaf. I therefore chose to paint on wood with a gold-leaf background. But instead of the Virgin and Child, I painted a father carrying his child, who has been killed in an attack.
