Ligne de vie Painting

A artwork made for a exhibition project with a photographer : Laurent Mayeux. The name of this project : LA LIGNE 14 18 - Arras/Ypres Laurent Mayeux photographed the horizon line formerly observed by soldiers buried in their trenches. I respond to Laurent Mayeux's horizontal photographs by using color and vertical shapes. Each painting shows the silhouette of a soldier into which I reinterpret the photographed landscapes, by symbolizing the rebirth of nature. "Minding" the wound, "Penser" la blessure Many years ago, I was given some gauze and cotton dressings dating back to 1916. I’d kept them in a tin, thinking I might find a use for them someday... That day has come. Born and raised in Lille, I spent my childhood between the metropolis and the Dunkirk coast, hence my attachment for Flanders. The Line project particularly appeals to me since it deals with an artistic undertaking bearing on a territory within which Laurent and I grew up and lived from one end of the line to the other. The landscape holds pride of place in my work and this project granted me an opportunity to associate it with a reflection on historical events and memory. I am quite fond of the photographer’s eye of Laurent Mayeux which discloses a linear, horizontal landscape, aligned along the axis of its horizon. The viewer’s gaze settles beyond that line, towards a distance, towards a moment and no longer towards a location. That is where the past, the present and the future meet. That idea fascinates me. That collaboration appealed to me. With ink and paint, I add my own perception and sensitiveness to that line that is both the front and the horizon. Like a mirror, the frontline separated two similar sides. So I chose not to allow the soldier featured in my installation to be identified: no helmet, no name for the combatant whose fate was split. He is British, Australian, Belgian, French, Canadian, Kiwi, Indian, Chinese, German... Only the landscape is identified by its GPS coordinates inscribed like a "dog tag". I answer the photographer’s horizontal images through colour and a set of lines inscribed vertically instead and inspired by the landscape. The poppy is targeted, the soldier fades away but the landscape persists, the poppies burst into bloom once more and the vegetation rises. The memory remains. It is extremely organized and orderly in the perfectly tended cemeteries along the frontline; it is also featured here in the landscapes, free, intangible and strongly present. It remains intensely moving, a hundred years after the war ended. My colours call up altogether the earth, the blood, the passion, the grieving, the poppy, but also the vegetation, hope and revival. My work is entitled "Minding" the wound. I bear in mind that which grows anew, that which rises in spite of the horror, that which reconstructs itself in time, that which keeps going, life. I want to believe that the mind can heal and cure the wounds, amidst memory, sharing and rebirth.