I always felt the desire to express myself without the conventional boundaries of society.  Suffering from dyslexia and social anxiety since an early age, this pushed me to find my own language. Using colors and shapes as words, art became a refuge. It helped me to escape reality and create a world of images beyond thoughts. This isolation gave me the distance necessary to explore on my own. I tried through my art to share my experience and communicate with others.

Painting

 Painting is for me a self discovery journey and a therapy. The process is as important as the finished piece and it is always a surprise which takes many detours and layers. I never settle for a pure aesthetic result, authenticity is the main goal.  I usually  use acrylic paint because I like to work fast, but I often add other mediums such as ink, glue, water color , pastel, or whatever else is available in my studio. Again, nothing is  ever planed, spontaneity is the only rule I let the colors, my mood, the forms take over...

I find abstraction to have this unique ability to transform itself under the eye of the observer. With no figurative reference, images create themselves..  My  hope is for the viewer to look without preconceived ideas and maybe find some affinities in the painting that resonate.

In 2020 due to Covid-19 like most people I was confined at home faraway from my studio. I had a recurrent dream of making wooden sculptures, but didn’t know how to start. These extraordinary circumstances made me realize that it was time to realize that dream even if I had no idea how. I started with small wooden shape and then getting more confident they became taller. As I was getting more experienced, I realized some unconscious images were emerging.

These shape reminding me of Corsica, the Mediterranean island where my family is originally from. This was the first time I wasn't able to come home because of the travel restrictions.

Corsica’s rocky landscape is shaped by large imposing granite boulders, sculpted by the wind and the sea. Additionally there are many granite prehistoric menhirs hidden through the island. It’s hard sometime to distinguish the work of nature and men.

As George Baselitz said “Sculpture is like archeology: You dig and you find something.”
My sculptures became my totems, in the original sense of the totem poles that you can find all over the word, a representation of an ancestor, a symbol of clan , a connection to a greater spirit . Like columns, minarets or steeples, they are timeless spiritual symbols of man’s need for connection to the sky, to some higher power. These forms are part of our collective unconscious. Like the prehistoric cave paintings they are images of our common humanity and our quest for transcendence.

In this time of world crisis I believe we are all in search of symbols to unify us and remind us of our interconnectedness.