Turmoil
The title of the exhibition refers to different aspects of the project. Thematically, it illustrates the turmoil of our times, marked by all kinds of disturbances, the most important of. which is climate change.
The turmoil is also created by the way these events are represented in images in the new media: hastily filmed, their capture on smartphones falls far short of conveying the actual experience. Where those who witnessed the tragedy wanted to capture fragments of reality, to make their clips exact copies of what they had witnessed, the web surfer discovers a scroll of blurred images, bordering at times on abstraction.
It is this confusion that my paintings seek to evoke in the viewer, playing with the affective closeness and aesthetic distance they may feel in the face of this pictorial figuration of the digital image. The depiction of storms and scenes of chaos also evokes an uneasy pleasure, which was widely exploited in much 18th and 19th century landscape painting, and which Burke, the great theorist of the sublime, defined as a "delicious terror" that comes from contemplating a danger from which we are beyond reach. My aesthetic is thus in the wake of painters such as Vernet, Loutherbourg and Turner.
Finally, my pictorial touch is characterised by confusion, exploiting the unevenness of the support to create vibratory effects that blur the contours of the objects depicted.
