THE HERITAGE OF MATTER

Brought onto construction sites at the age of nine alongside my father, a master plasterer and staff-maker, I discovered the magic of plaster: mixing the dry with the wet to bind a surface or give rise to a volume. The preparation, the blending, and the mixing initiated me into the rigor of the gesture, its repetition, within a space-time dictated by the unalterable rhythm of drying.

It was on these very sites, during my spare time, that I began to build useless forms. Diverting the artisan’s task to transform it into a sensitive object, endowed with ambiguity. From this early education, I have retained the physical need to master heavy materials in order to lighten them, and to sharpen into something biting what once seemed soft — from the masonry of my Percheron studio to the binder of my canvases.

My series are the direct extension of this labor: a plastic exploration where the pictorial object is seized in an attempt to border the organic. The shift from the synthetic toward the animal.