The Notebooks
The notebooks transcribe events, emotions felt in front of a landscape, the pink and gold mountains of En Gedin, the light of Cordoba, situations, uses and encounters; Both witnesses and diaries, they establish a dialogue between the sedentary man and the ephemeral hand, thus his art is that of the puppeteer bringing out an animated part of the world.
Chromatic Vibration
The quieter landscapes come from colored impulses and I work on the nuances to release a melody without sometimes even thinking about the motif, but about the emotion felt when faced with the flamboyance or the purity of a landscape.
When I started to think about this project, the beginnings of the Arab Spring had not yet clearly manifested. I followed the events through annotations and collages. I went to the villages of Mojacar or Noèpoli, on the island of Skopelos, to Jerusalem, the Palestinian Territories, Istanbul, Tangier,… and everywhere I felt a sense of welcome – sometimes tarnished by haggling. – and a simple and warm life despite the hardships. I remember Maria, illiterate, in the village of Noèpoli in Basilicata, whom I visited on my return from an outdoor drawing session in the mountains and who offered me the Limoncello that she distilled herself, to these amused Palestinian students on the Nablus Campus for whom I took turns painting their portraits, to these Flamenco dancers from the Cordoba Dance School, to this funeral ceremony according to the Orthodox rite in the half-light of a chapel in Skopelos. The pink and gold mountains of En Gedin, the light of Cordoba and its Mesquita, the winding road along the Bosphorus, the graceful coast of small coastal villages after the great bridge of Dubrovnic, are all sites witnessing the Mediterranean richness and whose outlines I liked to trace. Pencil in hand, which for me is a simple way to dialogue and create a link, I sometimes had the impression of following the thousand and one footsteps of mythical travelers in the Orient, from Flaubert to Delacroix, and fixing my memories personal on paper.
My notebook is a bit of a diary: I capture , , that come to life at the heart of the trip, and in contact with the inhabitants of the country visited.