ARTISTIC APPROACH, detailed

Over the past thirty years, 50% of the paintings sold worldwide have been made with acrylic. In modern and contemporary museum collections, it accounts for roughly 30%*.

My artistic research was born from a question about the medium itself. How can we accept that a synthetic material, derived from the petrochemical industry and uncertain in its long-term stability*, should serve to denounce the inertia of our leaders in the face of ecological crisis? While this contradiction passed unnoticed by the pontiffs of the visual arts, it only strengthened 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 tempera and encaustic, multiplying experiments to test matter itself as a means of expression. These explorations also led me to revisit the three traditional genres of painting — portrait, still life, landscape — as testing grounds for understanding the qualities and constraints of each medium.

At the same time, my reflection opened to the great theoretical debates of art history. I discovered, with surprise, that Picasso, the most influential painter of the 20th century, was firmly opposed to abstraction — even as the movement was reshaping his era. This contradiction led me to Wilhelm Worringer, a brilliant defender of abstraction, whose essay Abstraktion und Einfühlung fascinated me despite its flaws. His work revealed aesthetics as a science of form and, above all, opened the way to Alois Riegl, his predecessor, whose writings left a profound mark on me.

For Riegl, a persistent error runs through the history of the visual arts and continues today: an obsession with the “what” — content — while neglecting the “how” — the artist’s engagement with matter. More than a century later, the point remains valid. Art is now celebrated when it satisfies an intellectual need; the artwork itself becomes secondary, reduced to a pretext for an elite eager to prove its superiority by showing it understands what leaves the “inferiors” indifferent.

In contrast, Riegl claimed that evolution would resume only when humanity rediscovers the pleasure of sensory excitement. The driving force of this evolution, he argued, is unresolved difficulty. I fully embrace this position. 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 doubts before daring a solution. It is always easier, by contrast, to retreat into intellect, which provides endless pretexts for inaction.

*See: Association pour la promotion du métier de restaurateur de tableaux (3atp.org) —  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.