Titles

For me, the birth of a title often begins with the desire to summon a word I do not yet know. I search, I dig, until I find the word that resonates, that resists, that teaches me something, and that can shelter a form of poetry. The same process guides the making of my works. I like to let my readings, my relationship with architecture, conversations, and the exchanges of everyday life settle within me, each becoming fertile ground from which desires and necessities quietly emerge: the need to begin working, to search for forms, and to find the tools capable of giving them substance.

Beauty

I am not afraid of the word beauty. I seek it, I need it, and if I can evoke its presence, I am happy. I also like it when what appears is not immediately grasped. I invoke forms that recall more than they describe. My works—even those in two dimensions—remain close to sculpture. I draw libraries, formal alphabets of buried memories that I try to summon. I compose historical and geographical strata that complement one another, contradict one another, and reverse one another. Instability is my element.

Narratives

My love of the narratives woven through my work has a dual origin. When I was in my twenties, I had the extraordinary opportunity to live among Pierre Bourdieu's library, occupying his remarkable apartment alongside Marie-Claire, who shared his life. The walls of the space I lived in, on the third floor, Pierre's former study—formed cliffs of books surrounding me. I was twenty years old and discovering that thought itself could emerge through the organization of books: art alongside science, manuscripts beside literary works. It was profoundly moving to inhabit such an architecture of thought. A few years later, when I met Norbert Godon and, through him, discovered Aby Warburg, an impulse that had first been intellectual gradually began to take shape through new artistic productions.

Dust/Grisaille

Some time ago, my work revealed itself to me in a different light. I had forgotten the stories from my father's family, who worked in the coal mines of northern France, and those of my childhood in La Mure, in the Isère region. The slag heaps, the spoil tips, the pieces of coal resting on shelves, the physical sensations evoked by descriptions of descending into the shafts: the heat, the candles, the blackened lungs, and the timber structures supporting the galleries. On my mother's side were the blast furnaces that filled the windows of my childhood holidays, their cries, the showers of sparks that sometimes lit up the sky, the stories told by my grandfathers, steel, coal, pig iron, and the immense force of metallurgy. I think of them, of their gestures, their communities, extraction, matter, dust, fusion, and those monumental architectures: cold, beautiful, and strange. Today, this resonance seems to me to be an essential part of what binds me to that layer of dust, poised on the threshold between what separates it from the inside.

Habitats

I live and work between the Plateau d’Hauteville and Paris. I feel at home in both places. The Haut-Bugey has a landscape that, for the first time, made me feel that I belonged somewhere. There are cliffs, forests, springs, dark nights, luminous skies, and the open horizon of a mountain plateau. Paris has a different pulse, a different complexity: anonymity, encounters multiplied by sheer numbers, walls, details, small streets and great arteries that can appear differently each time you pass through them. I also value the distance between these two places, the possibility of moving from one to the other, and what that movement keeps alive.