"Performance" Painting

My work has always been driven by movement. Even in my early landscape studies I searched for motion—water, foliage, sky. Once I learned to draw the figure, the moving human body became central to what I do. In the 1980s I painted pedestrians in urban architecture and punk musicians performing in tight city spaces. Important shifts came from watching the cliff divers in Nice and discovering Charles Atlas’s films of Merce Cunningham’s dancers. From the 1990s onward I began working directly with dancers and contemporary circus artists, focusing on bodies in motion—falling, spinning, and moments of jeopardy.

The works shown here reflect two of my main themes.
The first is the moving figure, explored through multifigure compositions of divers and circus artists suspended in electric yellow or deep blue environments, or positioned over horizons between sea and sky or land and sky. These horizons may tilt to disturb equilibrium. The figures are organised in contrasting ways: from geometric unisons where each body seems free yet the group is bound into precise, almost mathematical structures, to chaotic arrangements of falling figures. Their silhouettes create a kinetic script, like hieroglyphs formed by shifting choreographies.

The second theme is the diver, which began with studies of the cliff divers at the end of the Promenade des Anglais in Nice and later continued in the studio with different models. These works present the nude figure on the cliff edge—pausing, hesitating, looking out to sea. The viewpoint is from above, so the horizon lies above the frame, encouraging the viewer to project themselves into the diver’s body in the moment before the leap.