Why did I choose painting in lacquer ?

St MAUR-des-FOSSES. Painting contest. Silver medal of the town, 1961

« “Moment of madness or unconsciousness? No: a teenager’s love at first sight! ”

I was sixteen and preparing for the entrance examination to attend “l’Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Appliqués et métiers d’Art” in Paris ; at that time I had never seen or heard of lacquers. During breaks I used to walk around the corridors of this school, pushing open the doors of the workshops, immersing myself in these unknown and so attractive worlds. I would imagine that I was already successful in the competitive examination… part of the students… Thus, I pushed open the door of the “Coromandel workshop.

In the semi darkness of the winter evening, I could see that some of the students’ work was hanging on the wall and this seemed to sublimate the softness of the light of a magical moonlight… What a sublime sweetness!… It was so beautiful!… It was dazzling, a great shock, a revelation… This unbelievable moment changed my life… I measure the good fortune of having been chosen by it. Lacquer is the expression of beauty in its purest form, material par excellence to express your dreams, existential emergence of sensuality.

he fruit of its such profound beauty remains a perpetual conquest, I am constantly trying to seduce it. So I invite you to dive deep into your imagination: It is all about letting the light sing through it. It is about matching together all natural resonances. It is all about letting go and letting your imagination take you where ever it wants to go.

The aim is to offer the imagination a figure, this first path from which we lose ourselves with delight and for us to try to penetrate the unfathomable… I don’t paint people but the original envelope is inseparable from humans : NATURE… Let’s offer to its imagination this vibrant, intense and diffuse melting point… Let’s give it the strength of the tree, the smell of wet leaves, the sky, the music of the wind and the Loriot.

Let’s offer it the wavering of the morning where we will have that brief interlude of abandonment, however still between two worlds… And most importantly, it offers water, the source of life:

” The soul of man is similar to water, it comes from heaven and returns to heaven”

This is your so overwhelming composition, Mr. Schubert :

“Song of the Spirits over the Waters” from your poem Mr Goethe.

“Water and the soul of man are so much alike, Wind and the destiny of man follow the same course…”

I do not paint, you men, but I paint your soul. I invite you to travel with Henri Duparc :

“My child, my sister, think of the rapture to go there to live together…”

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