ARTISTIC APPROACH, detailed
The Question of the Medium: The Point of Departure
Over the past thirty years, 50% of all paintings sold worldwide have been made with acrylic. In modern and contemporary museum collections, it represents roughly 30% of the works*.
My artistic research began with a fundamental question about the medium itself:
How can we accept that a synthetic material—derived from the petrochemical industry and whose long-term stability remains
uncertain*—is used to denounce the inertia of our leaders in the face of the ecological crisis?
This incoherence, ignored or minimized by the pontiffs of contemporary art, only reinforced my conviction and led me toward other mediums.
Difficulty as a Driver of Evolution
Inspired by Aurobindo, I understood that what remains unresolved opens the way to
transformation.
I began working with tempera and encaustic, multiplying experiments in order to test matter itself as a means of expression.
These explorations also led me to revisit the three traditional pictorial genres—portrait, still life, landscape—each becoming a terrain of inquiry to understand the qualities and constraints of every medium.
The Shock
A decisive moment in my life as a painter occurred during a workshop with Albert Handell in Woodstock,
NY.
He forced me to focus exclusively on values.
After three days, something broke open: a shift, an experience that revealed the distance between the intellectual interpretation of a thing and the felt perception of it.
This seemingly modest exercise in values acted as a springboard for my sensory consciousness. I no longer
saw the same things.
Paintings I believed successful suddenly appeared unresolved.
It was then that I decided to change my vocation.
From engineer, I became painter.
A Surprising Discovery: A Major Conflict Nobody Mentioned
While trying to understand what defines a good gallerist, I immersed myself in the writings of Daniel-Henry
Kahnweiler, Picasso’s dealer.
There I discovered that he was firmly opposed to abstraction.
The most influential artist of the 20th century was opposed to the very movement that would come to define that century.
Once the initial surprise passed, a greater one followed: in the vast domain of the visual arts—crowded with specialists—no one seemed to have examined this
contradiction.
A Contradiction that Ignited My Research
This contradiction led me to Wilhelm Worringer, a brilliant defender of abstraction, whose
essay Abstraktion und Einfühlung marked me deeply.
Worringer claimed that abstraction is the sine qua non for the emergence of a great style.
Certain that Kahnweiler could not let such a claim pass without responding, I returned to his writings.
I found traces of his answers, but they did not satisfy me.
This realization ignited my research.
It took hold of me completely and would require several years of work.
The Discovery of Riegl
At the same time, I had the privilege of spending time in Rome each year thanks to a long-standing friendship from my engineering studies.
Giandomenico introduced me to the city and to ancient art.
My research was stuck in a kind of loop when I learned—during one of my searches—that an English translation of Alois Riegl’s major text had been published by a
Roman press: Late Roman Art Industry.
It was the perfect opportunity to acquire it.
Riegl, Worringer’s predecessor, is the author most frequently cited by Worringer as essential for understanding his own work.
The Final Surprise
For Riegl, a fundamental error runs throughout the history of the visual arts:
too much attention is given to the what—the content—
and not enough to the how—the way the artist works with matter.
More than a century later, his diagnosis remains strikingly relevant.
Even today, art is often valued for its intellectual content; the artwork becomes secondary, a mere pretext for discourse maintained by an elite.
Riegl asserts the opposite: artistic evolution can only resume if we rediscover the pleasure of sensory
perception—otherwise, stagnation follows.
At the heart of his demonstration lies this idea: the difficulty contains the seeds of future evolution.
I fully adhere to this position.
With Riegl, there is only one evolution.
Unlike Worringer, there is no evolution triggered by abstraction alone.
And when Riegl discusses the material expression of the ineffable, the representation of space, or the rise of subjectivity, it becomes clear that Worringer misread
him.
This was my final surprise.
After twenty-five years, I was determined to bring my research to completion.
The Intellect as Refuge: A Risk of Stagnation
Riegl never received the recognition he deserved. Yet he saw clearly.
As in life: to overcome a difficulty, one must first acknowledge it, then confront one’s doubts before daring a solution.
The opposite path is easier: taking refuge in the intellect, which provides a thousand excuses for inaction.
But failure to face one’s doubts has consequences: one becomes rigid, conservative, imprisoned by certainties.
This, in my view, is the fate of much of contemporary art.
Under the guise of absolute freedom, the works displayed in museums around the world increasingly resemble one another.
This is stagnation.
*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.