How do you describe your own art practice?
My art practice revolves around personal interests for folkloric practices and vernacular beliefs in a globalized world. I try to understand the dynamics of communities and give various shapes to my experiences and research: performance, sculpture, photography or video.
What was your first experience with art?
Every year from the age of 10 to 15 years old, my art teacher forced me and my classmates to write a short essay about a show that we had to visit. I remember going to a solo by Georg Baselitz at Musée d’art Moderne, Paris. The exhibition opened with The Big Night by the Drain (1963), a large painting depicting a disfigured dwarf masturbating. It’s pretty much all I remember. Also, I went back for an other essay the following year and remember loving Tony Cragg’s dice sculptures. Still very cool I think. At the time, I was listening to Ace of Base.
What is your greatest source of inspiration?
Hidden folkloric practices, everyday life, ecology, pop culture, politics, friends and enemies.
What do you need in order to create your work?
Time, to get bored is quite precious I think… I can always try to force genius thoughts and experiment at the studio, but I get most of my best ideas while I’m driving, forced to do nothing but watch the road. I also need money to pay for the gas.
What are you working on at the moment?
I just opened a show in Rennes revolving around a 12th century text of Chretien de Troyes: Yvain, the Knight of the Lion. The exhibition revolves around the medieval figure of the wild man. It’s the follow up of a series of projects focused on the medieval wild man and its contemporary manifestations from European secluded solstice rituals to Tarzan, and language experiment conducted on great apes.
What work or artist has most recently surprised you?
I had to pull a tear when I saw Le Nouveau Né (approx 1648) by Georges de la Tour in real life two weeks ago. I’m rarely so emotional in front of art in exhibition spaces. Only cinema or RuPaul Drag’s race gets me so emotional. I don’t know what happened… I remember Pierre Sterckx, an art historian teacher at Fine Arts school telling us that the characters were painted like wax puppets, in the manner of the candles that enlighten them. Well, it’s my eyes that melted in the end. Also the latest Twin Peaks season. Boom!
