Horizontal Print

Earth as a canvas

Land. Native territory. Level with the ground, the silt.
The farmer knows that there, are the true places of the seasonal miracles..
There sows and forms the shape, models itself the harvest.
Authentic culture grapho-blows up of the ploughing, the furrow, the fuse, the line, the relief.
Domain of the perishable, of symbolism. Symbolic of the report of the man in the landscape. I like the risky fate of the nature and since it decorated with flowers, highly-rated short-lived sound, its physical and formal fragility.

Artistic rehearsal of the same gestures of the big father. Work the ground in the style of the farmer and of the gardener. Engrave a crumbled, granular, moved material(subject). To choose and to cultivate a plot of ground as we get ready a canvas, then its space once lined, to install its desire, its fleeting fantasy there.
Memories of one of the first games of a peasant childhood: move, draw on the ground…
Unusual image drawn by a playful innocence.
Simple existential desire.
Intervene on a place, mark it for, simply, say ” I exist ” without that it “I” imply inevitably a signature.
Insidious urge to break the limits of the frame, to redefine a new space between painting and sculpture and to discover, in the cœur of all my imprints, my own territory.
In each of my returns on the scene of my childhood, I glanced through, by plane, just before the landing, the house where I was born then fields and ploughings which lined the airport. And I had the bénéficial impression that this place which I liked, tiny point in the universe, belonged to me.
And from there, bit by bit, appeared the idea of a plastic registration in the reality, in the plot of land of the reality.
Do not make Land-Art, not deform the territory.
Work not the ground but use this ground as patch, huge support for a life-size carving.
The means to exceed the technical limits of the carving, to release/free me from a narrow corset where suppressed, clamped, by its own constraints, my internal space by bursting the preestablished dimensions of chassis, by adapting itself directly instead of creation and not the opposite.
Apply the same phenomena of Printed Territory and transpose them, by using local tools, on my own territory. The zinc becoming ground, the ink pigment, the burin tractor, the acid of the unified water and the edition, finally, a photography or a video film.
Only rules and limites : natural constraints.
Indispensable intervention of a poetic arena in a trivialized, common campaign, creature of habit. A by no means predatory intervention, only to alert the glance. Stop(ruling) on a configuration.
Le The face contains the main part of the mobile imprints.
The urge at first, to draw a head, near the airport, visible of at the top, by everybody. Quickly abandoned idea, left unresolved for the future because it seemed to me imperative to put my imprint, my first ground imprint, not on a ground chosen at random but on a piece of earth which is really mine, the grounds of my childhood. A field situated near the farm where I was born and where I increased, my favorite area of game(set). An ideal frame where from make the imprints reappear of run away past, to dig up, of an uncultivated ground, become thankless, the dry furrows of which inspire bigger things, all the fragrant universe today and living on the child that I was.
Territory of the childhood, the place of all my learnings, is in hiding where are planted my roots. Solid roots from which the tree, or the plant, can shine everywhere.

Vue d’ensemble

Détail de proportion oeil bleu
sillon, parcelle de melons

Détail d’un sillon irrigué

Plowing

A square of ground, 450 m2, and surrounded with reeds adorns wind on highly-rated left and lined, to the right, by a field of melon. A surface which it was necessary to prepare, by raking it, as we coat a canvas of apprêt.
As a painter becomes soaked with the still white canvas or a sculptor of the shapeless mass into which he is going to breathe the life, I recognized at first the characteristics, the geographic harshness of the ground for better, through him, to dread all the steps which walked on it, to interpret, at some point, all the messages that he was able to record in the course of time.
Make appear from this familiar ground, so full of my imprints and among which the imprint, itself, remains engraved in my memory, a new expression jusqu ‘ then unknown and nevertheless so alive.
Take place in the center of the field, think of this new expression by foreseeing a sight of at the top.Put itself in spirit, in weightlessness. Horizontal vision.
Then, as the ploughman, of a sure and serene step, I drew, of a single line(feature), without hesitance and without error, the first sketch, a first drawing in white.
A portrait with black features on a white hole stained with blue.
Blue, royal colour, symbol of a realm, a marking of territory.
Blue eye. Asymmetry of the portrait. Furrows as irrigated veins, roots back to front.
Intervene by means of agricultural means, directly or symbolically, to increase the peculiarity of surfaces proposed as a supplement to the already existing drawings.
A field works itself.
Use a motorized cultivator to draw deep furrows following the outlines of a human face. A spade to dig eyes and mouth.
A farmer sows his seeds.
Scattering pigments in furrows, eyes and mouth. Use only the symbolic colours: the sovereign blue and the white virginals. Distribute them each on a side of the furrow, make blue eyes, clear the mouth and the hair.
Essential role of the light which allows life.

The shadow of reeds creates the impression of hair.
The position of the sun defines the reliefs of the drawing, its hollows and bumps.
The light, coupled with the wind which tosses about the reeds, adds movement on the left. The hair moves, vibrates. To the right, a strip of spices, left such as it was, in a wild state, the cheek, in the evening, in the same way. Furrow V. Angle an edge of which is taken in the shadow when the other one is for the light. Passage of is in the West of the sunlight. Evolution of the artwork. Mobile portrait. Alive portrait. Games of shadow and light.
Continuation of the face by the surrounding surfaces.
The face not enclosed in a square but which guesses by these openings, by what is not printed. The unspoken.
The water makes live a culture. The water gives the life to the work.
In the Southern fields, the canals of irrigation are installed on edges. The water arrives at the level of the neck, pours, clearing itself a passage in furrows dug for that purpose. It absorbs the first pigments, natural, diluables, is colored before spreading along the outlines of the face, in eyes and mouth. The finished circuit, it stands out (goes out again) from the other one esteemed by the neck. A dam prevents a supplementary influx and the water reduced in the ground leaves its tracks in the form of deposits of colour by this there. The water fertilizes the ground.
Work revealed thanks to the water by the set of the contrasts of the diluted colours. Irrigation of the maternal centre of the head. Journey in the center of the human being.
The size of this sculpture-fresco being accommodated to that of the ground, difficult to perceive the totality on the ground. Photos, taken by helicopter, allow, also, in a certain way, to play with the whole space, giving the work its true dimension.
Result: the vague plot, now corrected, fitted out whose truth was fleeting.
Drawing, tattoo, carving, modelling of a plan anthropomorphe which does not wait either for reproduction, or for perpetuity, and exposes itself to the swaggering and the ravages of time. At the mercy of the wind, of the rain, of the entertainment or of the “iconoclastic” boldness of a passer-by: insect, animal or human being.

The life given, so delivered unto itself, is the mystery of nature. A dynamic metamorphosis but short-lived. Try in no way to hasten its evolution. Leave a total freedom.
Respect the laws of a fate which we, as humans, ignore.

Imprints upon the land

The work was created in a week’s time, during the month of August, and deteriorated throughout the nine months that followed.
The vast unknown :
– the changing effects of the sun
– how the work would evolve throughout the course of the day
– what it would become.
And the question of background:
– a transposition of this kind could it lead to something of interesting.
A fascinating, happy surprise.
Emergence of a new type of print.
Etheral impressions.
Only problem: work, in itself, was degraded very quickly. The traces of colors and the furrows spent nine months with completely growing blurred and the ground, gradually, was levelled.
From the same plate emerged, during nine months and according to the solar revolutions, of the heaps of different images.
Pulling in two visual forms: one immediately seen of the sky and its metamorphosis throughout the day, the other by the means of the photograph and the video.
Engraved ground.
Territory Impresses. Photographies, video. Loan of Territory.
Phantom emerged in full territory of childhood, on the place even of the birth. Transitory phantom, hardly perceived and already disappeared, captured via photography. Impossibility of engraving or of removing anything.
Nor sculpture. Nor painting. Only space enters both. Degree zero.
Reading according to the constraints of the place and not according to a clean will. Constraints which determined the site of the eyes, of the mouth, imposed their choice, required their own balance. Each thing being thus naturally at the place where it was to be, not only in its figuration but also in space where it is illustrated.
Nonfixed work in the moment but offering itself like a multitude of moments. With each glance, each time different

Reading on several levels: interior, external, of in top, of bottom. Another dimension.
To plunge in the interior, in the middle of the event. To put itself outside with the passing for better observing the event, better including/understanding it as in any human adventure.
Limit of transitory, fugacious, the reducing one. Limit of the means, the observations. Work often can be seen only of in bottom. Unreasoned desire of a dimension even larger.

Interior evolution of the artist in filigree of the evolution of work. Double revolution.
Release of the constraints of a traditional formation. Acquisition of an interior freedom which makes it possible to engrave on all and anything at the same time. Except standards.
External gigantism for an interior revolution.
To break the yoke of engraving.
To seek another system, to standardize it but with other rules.
To find one’s own artistic territory.
Idea to make reappear all that east impresse in this territory, this territory which is mine, before trying to reveal it at the different ones. Art, like a psychoanalysis.
Obligation to analyze oneself before analyzing others. Problems of adolescence. The artist does not become interesting that removed of his own problems and his incomprehension. All to include/understand with oneself for

Détail de l’oeil droit

Détail de l’oeil gauche