Untitled Painting

"Dawn will come and then the show they made will disappear, Sheol* the home for them!" (The Jerusalem Bible) This study is one in a series of square small formats. I started this work during the last autumn period (2014) about the All Saints' Day, or Day of the Dead which happens every November 1st in France. While going, every year at this time, visiting my father's grave, I realized then that I had become older than my poor Dad and as never before I lost all my landmarks*. On leaving the Cemetery, I experienced and meditated upon all my experiences. Back to the studio, digging in my spare part stock, I found a square small frame (35 x 35 cm / 13.7 x 13.7 in) which triggered my inspiration. I felt by chance on an old mirror card which was reflecting my face, twisted and distorted. I then cropped the image though the wooden frame which fit perfectly with a head's size. But I was in something of a dilemma. For some years now, my research is going toward abstraction. I always thought that abstraction appears more close to reality, in any case, reality such as we live it today which is a fragmented and popularized real through the media completion… and in regards to reality, it seems to me that the important and strong thing in painting doesn't appear in this constant circulation of the images, as in painting where tactility and physical presence have a report as well on the scale as with the opticality. So with that, the way of a painter would not be reduced to the opposing representation/abstract idea. It really was of concern to me, so I started to look into it more and more. Furthermore, how to avoid falling into the fascinating poisonous trap from the carnivorous spell of the famous portrait's studies of F. Bacon with which this actual work attempts to get in resonance? Painting requires a specific experiment where the process is an act of contemplation and meditation. The artist is nourished of the whole history of Art and the pictures are nourished by painting which falls under a concept of historical continuity of the Painting where intervenes the personal history of the artist… This is also why this series of studies tries to negotiate between human intimacy and abstraction. *Sheol (שאול): Untranslatable Hebraic term, that refers to the “stay of dead". The eminent biblist William Foxwell Albright points out that SHE'OL seem to share the root of SHA'Al, which literally means “the question”. *Landmark: Also noteworthy is that in French this word is said: "repère" \ʁə.pɛʁ\ that sounds like "père"\pɛʁ\ ("father"). To even go further on the desire at play in intersubjective fields, "re-père" would mean "re-Father" in the Lacanian sense.