Work - 瑛九 Print

I was born in Nancy, France in 1964 and lived in the United States. I came to Lausanne, Switzerland in the 90s where I live and work as a researcher in materials science, spending increasing time in Japan since 2022. I have always been drawing and I create oil paintings in the footsteps of my maternal grandfather. I have the privilege to work since many years in Elisabeth Llach's workshop "I prefer what touches me to what surprises me". These words are from the XVIII century French harpsichorist and composer François Couperin, which I reuse here as they beautifully apply to the work of painting, like the gradual change of colors over the seasons: Painted palisade The green trees are all pink This is my season (Paul Eluard, eleven hai-kais, 1920) My work is a tribute to the long-standing friendship and artistic complicity between France and Japan. I reinterpret works from the 16th to the 20th centuries, making preparatory collages combining ‘ukiyo’ landscapes and characters from both cultures and from all eras. The titles of the paintings are inspired by readings of French surrealist poems and translated into Japanese ... or vice versa. Since 2010 I started to create enigmatic collages, whose titles are taken from surrealist poems. My approach is inspired by the automatic writing dear to Breton and Soupault and the observation of nature so beautiful and so definitely strange, ultimate enigma! I combine traditional collage, namely cutting and assembling prints using acrylic binders, with digital cutting and image processing techniques. Sometimes I add painted elements, preferably using gouache. One of my collages is a tribute to Swiss surrealist artist and photographer Meret Oppenheim: she comes out of a cup, she wears a fur tie and her left eye is masked by a teaspoon. The fur tie is inspired by a work by Mimi Parent. The cup, spoon and tie are also reminiscent of Meret's famous work entitled 'The Fur Luncheon' which is a fur-covered coffee service. All this construction is purely intellectual. But the idea of the hidden eye is on the contrary spontaneous, and came to me once the was collage finished. Its hidden meaning is that unlike most people, artists have two eyes: one turned towards the world, and one turned inward. My artworks have been acquired by private collectors in Switzerland, France, USA, Chile and Japan. Thanks to Elisabeth-sama for her intuition in experimenting with colors and to Masako-sama for complicity and inspiration. More on