Complex Colour

What I call ‘complex colour’ is the superposition of a multitude of freely and intuitively-placed touches of different colours to create a luminous material. It may resemble the technique used by the Pointillists, but it is more the result of accumulation rather than juxtaposition. Very different colours are placed side-by-side, organised around a dominant value.

The main characteristics of complex colour:

• It is an extremely mobile and pure luminous material of prismatic colours which reacts to the infinitesimal variations of daylight.
• It is in permanent vibration, troubled by subtle and restless energy akin to Brownian motion. The bond connecting each detail to the painting as a whole means none can be removed: each coloured particle is interdependent and interrelated.
• Plasticity, fluctuation, polarisation and permanent modulations… Between the colours there are binary relationships: condensation and dispersion, attraction and repulsion, strength and weakness, proximity and distance, activity and passivity… which make up a new, dynamic, subtle and unfinished elementary language.

To elaborate such a material, it is necessary to enter into a slow rhythm where time is a factor of maturation. The variations in daylight allow to appreciate the various harmonies, the picture must echo light’s modulations.

This had led me to adopt a new attitude which is very different to that of the romantic, Promethean artist. The artist’s personality takes a back seat thus developing:

• an abandoning of self-centredness. I am not the centre of the world no more than the Earth is the centre of the world; an experience of weightlessness. Individual consciousness opens out to the consciousness of all things.
• a vertical vision. The inner space proceeds from bottom to top and conversely from top to bottom, between macrocosm and microcosm.
• vertigo in the face of infinity . Compared to the universe, man is nothing. And yet I think and I am destined to live within the dimensions of the known universe.
• the humility of the creator. A feeling of insignificance and modesty in the face of an infinite dimension and a boundless intelligence that invites us to experience total harmony, to live on good terms with the intelligence of the universe.