About the artist

Interview with the artist or "Digital Art at the Heart of Symmetries"

- Your artistic work is based on a fascination, it seems, for symmetries and circular figures. Where does this passion really come from?

- I have always been attracted by everything that is organized around a center. Symmetries have always seemed fundamental to me, not only in art, but also in nature and even in our unconscious. But it was truly during a trip to Italy, when I was eighteen, that I had an artistic revelation. I was overwhelmed by the pictorial, architectural and sculptural richness that one finds on every street corner.

- You are self-taught. How have you developed your art over the years?

- As soon as I returned from Italy, I began to read all the Histories of Art that I could get my hands on. Two authors particularly struck me: Élie Faure and René Huyghe. The first by his lyricism and his vision of art linked to the climate, the landscape and even the food that influence artistic style for him, the second by his demonstration throughout his books that art and nature are one.

- But you, how did you come to draw what we could call mandalas?

- It happened in two stages. At the dawn of my twenty-fifth birthday, a simple stone thrown into the water triggered in me a revelation that I would call mystical. The concentric circles formed on the surface and which were expanding to infinity, to end up disappearing, acted as a revealer of the deep structure of the universe.

“What if the center was everywhere and the circumference was nowhere?”

And then some time later when I was getting ready to be a father, I felt the need to take a sheet of paper and starting from the center to draw repetitive and symmetrical shapes. And since that day, I have never stopped creating circular shapes.

- When we look through your work we find a great diversity.

- It's true that I like to explore different artistic forms, without ever limiting myself to a single style. I first worked with classical techniques like painting and collage. Then, a few years ago, I moved to digital art, which completely freed my creative process. In just one year, I created more than 300 digital paintings.

- Why this switch to digital?

- Because this technology has allowed me to go further, faster. It has given me unprecedented freedom to explore the symmetries and fractal patterns that fascinate me.

- You often mention nature as a source of inspiration. How does it influence your work?

- The observation of living things is essential for me. I have always been convinced that art and biology, nature and common sense, this famous wisdom of the shepherd are intimately linked to the intuition of beauty! Ernst Haeckel, for example, whom I discovered late in life, was both a scientist and an artist. He illustrated with fascinating precision the symmetrical structures of jellyfish and micro-organisms. His work inspires me deeply.

- Tell us about this naturalist close to Darwin who was the first to use the word ecology which is so dear to our times.

- Yes, with pleasure: Haeckel, taking advantage of the development of the microscope, was the first to study jellyfish, radiolarians and many micro-organisms. As much an artist as a scientist, he set out to represent what he saw, illustrating the impressive beauty of the biological world.

Fascinated, he wrote: "I will never forget the delight that seized me when I observed for the first time the first Tiara and the first Irene, the first Chrysaora and the first Cyanea and that I tried to reproduce their sublime forms and colors with my brush of a young twenty-year-old student."

- You told me about a special gift he had...

One of these books, Artistic Forms of Nature, appeared in 1904, enjoyed particular fame and had an impact on both the scientific and artistic worlds of the time.

Max Schultze, a renowned anatomist, wrote about this book that it was the most beautiful scientific work related to art that was on the lower animals... and that he did not know what to admire more: nature which created such diversity and beauty of forms or the hand of the designer who knew how to transpose these wonders on paper."

- It seems to me that your work goes beyond the opposition between traditional and contemporary art. How do you analyze this fact?

- My work tries to escape the two pitfalls of modern art, which tends either towards chaos or the anecdotal. I think that we have deconstructed enough, even if Picasso and others had the genius to do so in their time, and that now we must reconstruct and give meaning and beauty to creativity. For the record, when I had some of my paintings printed for the first time, I instinctively put them in a natural environment. To see if it carried weight and especially if it integrated.

- It reminds me of another artist who is dear to you, Pierre Soulages.

- Yes, absolutely! His approach in Conques was to integrate the stained glass windows into Romanesque architecture and not to do something shocking, garish and anachronistic like certain contemporaries that modernity adores.

- it is also showing humility.

- Yes, in Soulages the man, that's what I like above all! He's someone who is embodied and who is in contact with matter. He's a craftsman at heart.

- I'm going to provoke you, but you're pure virtual.

- Certainly, but the natural and ancestral forms that inspire me are there to keep me connected and above all to make me as humble as possible.

- You also have a strong connection with Carl Gustav Jung, spiritually speaking. What role does he play in your artistic thinking?

- Jung was a fundamental discovery for me. Like a "Presence"! Like him, I often experienced troubling coincidences that he called synchronicity. And I found in him this same fascination for circular figures. I believe it is in My Life that he writes:

- You told me you discovered it just after you started drawing.

- Yes, discovering his autobiography written at the end of his life, I learned that he spontaneously drew circular figures, mandalas every morning, to understand his own unconscious.
- What a beautiful example of synchronicity!

- Yes! He saw in it a reflection of the Self, an organizing psychic center. This revelation came at a time when I was conducting research on natural and cultural, animal and technological symmetries. I was scouring encyclopedias to notice symmetry everywhere: from the first airplane engines to snowflakes, Gothic rosettes or spider webs, those great innate architects. In all areas we found this subterranean mathematics at work.

- Do you think that contemplating these shapes arranged around the center and their symmetries has an effect on the mind?

- Undeniably. By exploring fractal shapes and symmetries, I seek to touch on something fundamental, a kind of timeless aesthetic language. Like Jung with his mandalas, I feel that my work is a way of mapping an invisible part of our reality. My goal is to invite viewers to see differently, to feel a connection between the microcosm and the macrocosm, between the intimate and the universal.

- One last question: Jung said of his work on mandalas "I knew that I had reached the ultimate discovery that I would ever reach." Do you feel the same way?

- (Laughs) Not yet... Each work is an exploration, a new step in my research. Maybe one day, I will also have this certainty. But for now, I take it as a game, curious to see the result when I assemble various elements. Because you shouldn't take yourself too seriously either. And I continue to explore, with always the same fascination, the symmetries and the mysteries they conceal.

Interview conducted by Jean Leclair in March 2024.