Manifesto

I am interested in anthropology and how people perceive the world. I see myself as an inbetweener. Born in Africa, but French with very strong Andalusian ascendency, and having lived more than half my life outside France, I feel I am at the intersection of cultures and civilizations, which allows me to draw from many different sources, western and eastern, to find my own truth.

Conceptual approach

My work has always been moulded by my life experiences as a migrant, in France first, coming from Algeria, in South Africa in my early 20’s, in Ecuador for six years as well as now the UK where I live. With these life experiences I have moved more and more inexorably toward an exploration of a personal philosophy of life.

Visual language

I’ve been developing my artistic language for a long time. When people look at my work, they’ll recognise the iconography, the colour palette, the symbols I am using and the language and the language they generate. You’ll see fish, birds, hopscotch, the all-seeing sun, snakes, trees, representation of the ancestors and foetuses, the holes in the wall of reality and the line delineating consciousness from the unconscious. They’re all connected. Every painting is another page of the same story, another image of the same universe. Sometimes similar, sometimes very different, they all participate to the same ideas and are steps in my understanding and depiction of them. 

About this series

Inspired by Proust famous quote: “True paradise is one you’ve lost”, this series explores how memories generate forgetful embellishing processes, undermined by a diffuse feeling of unease and interrogation, as, in the words of Marcel Proust again, “Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”

Arcadia lens/Utopia series

Each print is a digital print on hahnemühle paper, dim: 77x56cm, edition of 79, signed and numbered on the back, with certificate of authenticity provided.