My work is rooted in patience and time, each picture owing its own history from a place or a trip.
They are essentially made of tropical vegetal matter.
Having lived for a long time in the Amazonian forest, cut off from villages and trails, save some waterways, I began in 1992 to use tree leaves and flowers as other artists would do with oil or acrylic.
Marvelling at the wilderness, the diversity of the shapes and textures in the vegetal world, I explore their fragility, using preferably weathered elements, munched by insects, mistreated by a sometimes hostile environnement, in order to create abstract landscapes, that reveal their delicateness and their beauty.
My pictures are nevertheless not ephemeral.
No gluing would stand the test of time, if the long sequence necessary to their preparation was not respected.
Leaves are pressed in place one by one. Apart for a few exceptions, the progress rate is of one vegetal element per day and per picture.
I have to adapt to each variety’s specific structure, allowing time to discover their sensitvity, until we have tamed each other.
Some of these works have needed a full year of work, excluding the collecting and drying phases.
Leaves are sometimes so thin, or so degraded, that simple manipulation is impossible.
The supports then become aquatic and I can only position them while they are immersed.
The glues I use are organic, they don’t dry out the matter, which would otherwise split and break.
Hundreds of elements, flower petals, fragments of leaves, fibers, pigments or bark paper, collected while travelling on several continents may mingle in a single composition, each adding to the creation depth and movement.
I am fond of playing with the visible and the invisible, what exists and what can only be guessed.
I superimpose, playing with transparencies, plant glimpses of light and shadowy areas in a constant quest of balance and disparity.
My pictures are gardens, lost or imaginary, peaceful spaces in which spirit can nest for an instant.
A tentative approach of our humanity through the echo of a benevolent energy, the sketch of a generous promise in our relation to the world.