ARTISTIC APPROACH, detailed
Over the past thirty years, half of all paintings sold worldwide have been executed in acrylic. Museums of modern and contemporary art hold collections where nearly thirty percent of the works are acrylic-based*.
My artistic research was born from a question about the medium itself. How can a synthetic material, derived from the petrochemical industry and whose long-term stability remains uncertain*, be used to denounce our leaders’ inertia in the face of the ecological crisis? This contradiction, overlooked by the pontiffs of contemporary art, only reinforced my conviction and led me toward other mediums.
Difficulty is a vector of evolution. Inspired by Aurobindo, I came to understand that what remains unresolved opens the path to transformation. I turned to egg tempera and encaustic, multiplying experiments to test matter itself as a means of expression. These explorations also led me to revisit the three traditional pictorial genres—portrait, still life, and landscape—as fields of trial to better understand the strengths and limitations of each medium.
At the same time, my thinking opened to the great theoretical debates in art history. I was struck to discover that Picasso, the most influential painter of the 20th century, strongly opposed abstraction — even though this movement would come to define his era. This contradiction led me to Wilhelm Worringer, a brilliant defender of abstraction, whose essay Abstraktion und Einfühlung fascinated me. Worringer destabilized the Cubists, whose staunch supporter Kahnweiler, all his life, retaliated through his writings. The discovery of this conflict ignited my research. It revealed aesthetics as a science of form and, above all, opened the way to Worringer’s predecessor, Alois Riegl, whose writings left a profound mark on me.
For Riegl, a fundamental error has accompanied the history of the visual arts and persists to this day: we focus on the what—the content—while neglecting the how—the way the artist works with matter. More than a century later, this observation remains valid. Today, art is celebrated when it satisfies an intellectual need; the artwork itself becomes secondary, a mere pretext for a discourse maintained by an elite.
Riegl argued the opposite: that evolution can only resume when humanity rediscovers the pleasure of sensory excitement—otherwise, stagnation prevails. The driving force of this evolution, he said, is the unresolved difficulty. I fully share this view. Riegl never received the recognition he deserved, yet he saw clearly. As in life: before overcoming a difficulty, one must first acknowledge it; then confront one’s doubts before daring a solution. The intellect, by contrast, makes it all too easy to hide, offering a thousand pretexts for inaction.
Failing to confront one’s doubts has consequences: one becomes rigid, conservative, trapped in certainties. This is the condition of contemporary art. Under the guise of absolute freedom, the works exhibited in museums across the world end up looking the same. That is stagnation.
For me, painting is therefore an act of resistance:
resistance to the consumer society,
resistance to the domination of concept,
resistance to the intellectual confusion that diverts art from its primary function—
that of offering a sensory experience, where matter restores meaning to the world.
*See the study by the Association for the Promotion of Painting Restoration, presented by Hervé Canteau,
— http://3atp.org/nettoyage-des-peintures-acryliques-non-vernies
Note: This reference is in French, but it can be easily translated using your preferred translation tool.