Wooden frame on floor, acrylic on unfixed canvas, approx. 1 x2,5 x1m.

2018

To propose paintings elsewhere than on a wall is not about eliminating or condemning the canvas mounted on frame but about coming up with innovative propositions. At the borderline between sculpture and painting, Se peindre et s’étreindre is an exercise to transform painting into a spatial installation with the frame simulating a bed. To see it in its entirety, one has to back up, to view the two painted entwined naked bodies, one needs to get close. Philosophically, the two figures locked in each other’s arms attest to the two primary states of the body, the subjective, which enables us to imagine the world we live in since we were born, and the objective, the concrete body mass living in time and space and destined to disappear.

My work reasserts the need to apprehend the world through our everyday established codifications as we know and recognise them. From a critical standpoint, I deplore that we are witnessing a cultural levelling that is programmed by all international organizations working hand in hand. Se peindre et s’étreindre does not wish to picture human misery nor beauty or any other human trait but seeks to question the condition of the body within the loss of certainty and identity caused by the fading out of the boundaries between gender, nationality and class. Duplicating a body, in this case my own, is a way to reaffirm human presence, to regenerate it in search of meaning instead of just following the present-day trends to virtualize or mutate it.