D'OLYMPIA N.C-N°30- S2 Painting

“D'OLYMPIA”: Here, in this new pictorial context, Titian's famous Venus is transformed, so to speak, into an “Olympia”, echoing that of E. Manet ... She reappears from below the painting, but only partially uncovered, and actualizes herself in the tactile and sensitive present of the painting. Very close again and dominating the space, she solicits the viewer's gaze with her charms ...; or someone who breaks into the scene instantly. And we know that Manet particularly appreciated Titian's Venus ... (Iconographic reference: TITIEN, La Vénus d'Urbino, 1534, Uffizi Museum, Florence, Italy). As in all this series, pictorial and graphic zones from which resurface heterogeneous and anachronistic fragments of art images and paintings torn from time, updates, tears to pieces for an unexpected as well as new destination. Torn, superimposed, intertwined, these collages and take-offs play with eclecticism, the hybrid, the chimera, the motley, even the ruin, to represent paradoxically, here again and always in the present. The pictorial film remains visible with its repentance, its traces, its overlaps. De-figuration / reconfiguration, the fragment hides a detail, a movement is lost in its course, a mask obliterates a look, a writing is drowned under another. Freed from their origins and seemingly out of nowhere, crossed gestures and glances make a new surface, here and now, agree and dialogue before our eyes in the reconquest of a new space-time. Heterotopia of art, heterochrony of painting, here even these "curiosities" beckon us (sometimes with humor), despite the imminence of loss, the threat of erasure ... - "We must not say that the past illuminates the present or may the present illuminate the past. An image, on the contrary, is where the Old meets the Now in a flash to form a constellation." Walter Benjamin.