Icon — The pigment blown by the spray can gives the impression of a construction painting, of a mastered approach to what is, in the end, a gestural painting closer to calligraphy or drawing. Black and white drawing was, during the Renaissance, a preparatory technique for the final painting. One would draw first, then apply colours in paint on the same surface. This technique was called Grisaille. It corresponds to today's Repentirs (sketches). The opposition between drawing and painting, between black and white versus colour, has fuelled debates for centuries. It was argued that the black drawing, in its sobriety, pierced naked reality, while painting adorned itself with beautiful colours to attract the eye, to charm, to entertain. Grisaille was therefore a grey truth dressed in colour to form the final painting — just as a theatre play is a lie staged to better reveal an intimate truth.
This series reads in the same way — as a narrative seeking intimate truth. It echoes the flamboyant Neo-Gothic style of the church, offering a graffiti-fluorescent stroll, a wandering through the cave, through the underground, into the sanctuary. The icon emerged from Christian crypts. Mosaics, like encrypted pixels, were exchanged in the catacombs of Rome and Lutetia, creating a confidential collectors' market before emerging in the temples of patrons of a constantly evolving sacred art. Then it became Hellenistic, seeking the grace of the Renaissance of the popes to pop — from the Mona Lisa to Marilyn Monroe.
But the icon is above all the impassive and serene portrait of the mother, of the Virgin Mary. The mother's face is the newborn's first landmark, the first love, the first cartography of our life, the first face on a long road where, as we go, we define ourselves by comparison with others. The landscape of time — that of a life — is not made of sunsets or starry nights. It is made of faces we have encountered, onto which we have projected our differences and our similarities.
Along this journey, there are unique, singular moments of prayer, meditation, introspection. In those moments, we stand before an icon, a portrait onto which we project ourselves, like a mirror of the soul, in an ultimate face-to-face stripped of narcissism, of social makeup, honestly reflecting upon our condition, our path. We project our hopes, our morals, or the humble satisfaction of knowing the grace that surrounds us.
To wander through a church or an exhibition hall is to seek an anchor point, a surface upon which one reflects, upon which one is reflected. We have always done this — since cave paintings, since the dawn of time, sheltered from storms, in deep galleries, around sacred hearths where stories were told. Shadows danced on the walls where our individuals were projected; our hands blew pigments among the animals to hunt, their transhumances, tracing in chalk the first mythologies, the first burials, the first calendars, the first cosmogonies of which we were the witnesses.
Why are we witnesses to all these things? Our caverns were cathedrals. Our cathedrals are caverns where we take refuge, where we are welcomed outside of time, within the stone, within ourselves. From the fire at Notre-Dame de Paris to the beginning of the health crisis, Parisians were reminded that the line between cultural and religious heritage can be thin, that their legacies blended into one another.
The climatic storm has given us the desire to take refuge in the caverns of suspended arts, in the hollow of mother earth, in the welcoming face of the Holy Mother, in the depths of our innermost self, in the hollow of a stain accidentally formed amid the universal — in an instant of peace and serene, distant understanding of the human adventure, of its intertwined destinies, woven of finitudes and eternities.