For about ten years now, I have been creating paintographies. As its name suggests, a paintography is a mixture of painting and photography.
From photography, I keep the initial shot, an essential and unavoidable basis for the work to come. I also retain, despite all the successive manipulations carried out afterwards on the computer, the precision, finesse and plastic quality that certainly distinguish it from painting other than hyper-realistic. However, a paintography is not a photograph, it is a plastic construction that raises doubts in the eyes, that raises the question of the nature of the image that is offered to the eyes of the spectators. What part of the work was captured by the objective, what part recreated by the software work, what part brought by the acrylic glazes?
Layers, layers, stacks: despite its extreme readability, a paintography is a complex construction, based on a succession of screens. The fabric or skin never appears naked, they are always covered by a material that is as much a screen as it is a body with them. This matter is itself obscured by squares that seem either to detach from it or to deepen within it; by evoking the pixels at the base of any digital image, these squares remind us that this matter is a decoy, that it is virtual. And yet, in the works in mixed technique, it is precisely these squares that appear in relief on the surface of the canvas, in a strange transparent materiality...
