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15
Hello Mickaël, and welcome to NotRandomArt. The current issue is revolving - around the problem of communication and identity. Is there any particular way you would describe your identity as an artist but also as a human being in dynamically changing, unstable times? In particular, does your cultural substratum/identity form your aesthetics?
First of all, I am very pleased to answer your questions and participate in this interview...
In the age of globalization, whether in art or not, it has been obvious to me to ask myself the following question: what is an artist in the twenty-first century, and what is the relevance of the existence of painting ... which involves knowing who I am at a given time. What is transmission, how can I use it in the sense of a creation, who am I as an artist and as a citizen, a human being in the world. With the Internet, it is easy and possible for us to meet all the cultures of the world, all aesthetics. This confrontation, in the positive sense of the term, is essential today, but it becomes truly interesting and productive when it allows the "individual artist" to create his own identity and thus allow him to develop with as much freedom as possible his own art, and hence his own aestheticism. Drawing in the past of course, but having the ability to position itself in relation to other aesthetics, thanks to the web in this case. I use it a lot, maybe in doing so my painting remains “French” but becomes universal by its aestheticism. Besides, it is perhaps the real challenge for art and the artists of the twenty-first century: to find a balance between “where I come from” and “where I really am”. While avoiding the standardization of what we propose ... it is a rather difficult work in fact, which requires a real implication in the progress of thought ... What then makes the artist an actor in the movement of the world ...
Would you like to tell us something about your artistic as well as life background? What inspired you to be in this artistic point in your life when you are now?
My first artistic emotions came from music ... I learned the guitar all by myself, and played in groups at around 17 years old in high school (like many young students)... Being a great reader of books, I started at the same time to write short stories and poetry. But I felt that my sensitivity would not be fully expressed thanks to these mediums ... the desire for painting became evident at around 20 years old, after visiting the Picasso Museum in Barcelona ... I thought : this is it ... True freedom is in painting! I dropped my studies in physical sciences and mathematics for art studies. From that moment my whole life has tilted and has become only a slow construction of myself and my freedom through painting. This allows me to travel and grow as an artist ... But my other studies have taught me rigor and patience. So I explore enormously all the pictorial techniques and all the means in painting and drawing, like a perfectionist maniac. I take time, because everything is there ... the consciousness of your own time of existence is the key to persevere. So it took me a long time to get to my last works, but all this time was worth it I think ...
Could you identify a specific artwork that has influenced your artistic practice or has impacted the way you think about your identity as a participant of the visual culture?
I have many references, but if I had to keep one, it would be the works of Matthias Weischer in particular. His interiors have a rather direct influence on me, I began to take a closer interest in the artists of Leipzig, and I said to myself that I had to raise my level, both technically and in my personal research. David Hockney is obviously a cursor also but since then I have immersed myself in the paintings of the Italian Renaissance and Flemish painters for the skies ... it is this melting pot of influences that allowed me to create my own visual identity combined with an understanding of the paths of each person ... Based on the most perfect technique possible to open the fields of freedom of creation and a classic basis of a construction of works with very contemporary markers in the representation ...
Many of your works carry an autobiographical message. Since you transform your experiences into your artwork, we are curious, what is the role of memory in your artistic productions? We are particularly interested if you try to achieve a faithful translation of your previous experiences or if you rather use memory as starting point to create.
In general, memory, memories of what form our lives are often an important starting point in many artistic forms ... In my case, it works, but the more I progress, the more my memories blend with my various readings, which also resonate in any case with the ideas that anyone can make of life ... then a mixture of live reality and fantasy reality takes place. My interiors then become scenes, as in a theater. They are not just a decor, these interior spaces are the matrix of my thought where ideas will circulate ... That is why we find chairs, tables and other carpets, which could be called my main actors ... then there is a few interims that intensify the subject, as in the works "L’oiseau noir dans le soleil levant" and "l’habitude des tropiques" where we find similar elements, such as the bed and the chair ...
tion of Grotowski ... Both of them have led me to go to theater school. In this school I had meetings. Meetings with artists but also and especially human beings that made me discover. I always need o discover rather than to master a practice. It's probably the reason my encounter with Monica Klingler and Boris Nieslony was decisive for me and led me on the path of Performance Art which is a form still difficult to define. Each performance artist has a different definition of what it is...
Could you identify a specific artwork that has influenced your artistic practice or has impacted the way you think about race and ethnic identity in visual culture?
No I don't have a specific artwork that has influenced my artistic practise but many.
I'm influenced by some philsophers as well as poets or musicians or dancers or visual artists but also by some places or landscapes or atmospheres ... For some years, I was used for example to go to India where I was used to follow some traditionnal muscians or to learn bharatanatyam and practice vipassana meditation... Of course this experience has impacted my art work.... This brought me to think and work differently... My experience in India brought me to discover traditionnal strong art and paradoxally to the way of Performance Art. But there I see one common point: to make no separation between art and life and to be here and now, without projection on the future.
It's difficult for me to speak about race and ethnic identity. But I can say that today we miss more and more this notion of “to be here and now” which is more present in some cultures ... By practising Performance Art, it's my way to be connected to this way of thinking. And even in this field actually it's more and more difficult. The society and the art world brings us more and more to plan in advance, to define our work, more than to do. Just to do. To do what we deeply need.
And of course, my encountering with Black Market International and later the notion of Open Source or Open session via PAErsche have also a big impact on my work. When we go on that, each of us perform by sharing time and space but without trying to convince each other on some common way. This is for me a wonderfull way how we can meet each other, regardless of our origin, our race or our “identity”...
Many of your works carry an autobiographical message. Since you transform your experiences into your artwork, we are curious, what is the role of memory in your artistic productions? We are particularly interested if you try to achieve a faithful translation of your previous experiences or if you rather use memory as starting point to create.
My memory is clearly a starting point to create. I don't have any autobiographical message. I use my personnal experience ( what I feel , what I see, what I learn, what I ear...) to work. It's a motor or a material. I'm not able to paint, so I can't do something with red or white or yellow or black colors. All I have is life, a body alive. And I need to do something with that...
My sensation about life sometimes is too intense then I need to transform this intensity in some action. Some artistic action... If people can take something from this action this is great... but I don't want to give them “a specific message” or to control the translation of my experience.