Painting is a vital, essential, primary need. A privileged and intimate rendez-vous with a bigger world in which barriers fall one by one as the night goes on. Painting is also an opportunity to connect with those who I miss so much, probably there is no better medium. Painting is finally an incessant quest, an obstinate search for a form of raw expression that don’t need words.

Working in large formats radically changes the situation. A 50 * 100 cm is a manipulable object over which one has a physical hold. You can grab it with one hand and force it easily. A 2 meter reverses the balance of power, heavier to carry, more difficult to hang, longer to paint, more complex to understand. We immediately sense that the rules of the game have changed and that they are not necessarily in our favor. The baby is not born until he has already emancipated himself from the creator. The physical relationship is more demanding and all the more exciting.

I have long wondered how famous French painter Pierre Soulages was able to devote such a large part of his life to black color. To understand, I did a black, then two, then three, etc., and I got my answer. Obvious, natural. The association of black with unhappiness, despair, and death in the collective imagination seems to me improper or at the very least reductive in the case of painting. Black is situated far beyond these socio-cultural considerations. No more pretenses, no more artifice, no more excess, working in the dark comes down to engaging in an intimate, sincere and straightforward dialogue with oneself. And sometimes with the other. An attempt to approach his or her truth (s) in a land of infinite and endless exploration.

The second I put dark cadmium on my knife, my heart rate quickens and I begin to shake slightly with excitement, only breathing in spurts. Making reds is very similar to a crushing love affair. The tension is there, the rhythm is essential, the dynamics are essential, the concentration must imperatively be held from the beginning to the end. Anything can, at any moment, call into question the final success of the painting, just as a furtive smell or a stolen glance will call into question the strange adventure of seduction. The intensity is total. An artistic blitzkrieg.

Working blue color can be a playful and poetic breath, like a nice, unexpected and light encounter that will leave behind delicate memories. But the night is never far away and the blue likes to take hold of it in a process that then becomes much more introspective and dense. It then asserts itself as evidence from the depths of the soul. Between thinking and serenity.

White is in the west part of the world the color of marriage and purity. For me, it is that of past suffering, of harshness, of traumatic memory. I stay away from it, I mistrust it, I keep it at a distance, neither too close nor too far, like a necessary evil. Working in white takes me back to all those hours spent as a child in the psychiatric world visiting relatives who had failed. Over time, everything does not go away.

Brown has a terribly organic dimension. The color is never fully revealed, preferring to keep its share of mystery. The natural umber invariably sends me back to those distant explored lands where I experienced war. I put natural and burnt shade on my canvas and here I am thrown back twenty years in the middle of a burning and ruined Kabul. With that characteristic smell of hot iron.