Lishma 14/27 לשמה Print

Born in France in 1955, I live and work in Jerusalem since 2015.
I started painting with a friend in an evening class at school. He liked to draw, I liked to paint. We both entered the Institute of Visual Arts in Orléans (1975/76), and then I was admitted to the Art Department of the Villa Arson - National School of Fine Arts in Nice - (1976/79). After graduating, I trained as a house painter and then studied to become a psychiatric nurse (1980/1983). I already knew a little about hospitals and their patients, having worked there every summer as a ward attendant during my studies at the School of Fine Arts. Becoming a psychiatric nurse and then a nursing supervisor at the Georges Daumezon Mental Health Center in Loiret, I combined painting and psychiatry almost daily. Along with fatherhood and Judaism, they were my only true sustenance. In Orléans and Nice, I discovered : the abstract painting, the Quattrocento , the prehistoric Art and the Chinese painting. We had to know "everything" about the works that preceded us, and particularly those of the 20th century. We had , in some way, to answer for our own work in front of them. All the paths of contemporary art were open to us. Somewhat against the grain, I chose painting rather than Marcel Duchamp's path.
 At the beginning of my nursing studies, I also met André Robillard a former patient. He lived at the hospital ; he drew, assembled, amassed, and collected in what served as both his home and studio. I was discovering the « raw art » and also the expressions of madness. This was evident in the often ephemeral works of patients — poems, drawings, songs, confidences, words— coming from the depths of their being, as well as in the writings of Antonin Artaud. In 1984, after a detour through landscape, still life, and self-portraiture, I returned to painting where I had "left" it. I began working from compositional principles drawn from art history and geometry Everything begins randomly, like a roll of the dice: the placement of geometric shapes derived from the compositional principles on the canvas or stretched paper. Each element carries the design of the six or seven others that compose it: lines and shapes emerge from this interweaving, itself carrying many more to come. Flat gestures and lines, white, black, or colored, will, in turn, anchor themselves to these creations in the unforeseen nature of a form of "free association.