If you're Charles and you want your friends to come with you to watch the sun set over the Allier, you call up a dozen of them and they arrive at one hundred and fifty .... With tables, guitars, roast leg of lamb and barrels of wine and our Musketeer, with his thunderous laugh, will say to you: "Let's eat!
Yes, a Musketeer who wields a paintbrush like a foil, his Nevers boot in the art of precision.
Born in Lille in 1966, he studied drama at the Conservatoire National Supérieur d'Art Dramatique, before moving to Florida in 1989 to work as a portraitist for Walt Disney.
On his return to Paris, he embarked on a long period of apprenticeship, working on a variety of projects (canvases, sets, frescoes, evening happenings, posters, magazine covers, sculptures, etc.) for five years and for a number of companies including Nokia, Mediascenie, Bouygues, Canon and Louis Vuitton.
In 1997 he devoted himself exclusively to painting. Convinced that it was not up to the artist, who was reluctant to do business, to defend his work in front of gallery owners, but up to "art dealers" to find the works, he organized his own exhibitions, which certainly demanded a great deal of his time and energy but gave him real freedom.
In a wide variety of locations, from his studio in Montreuil, a disused 1600 m2 factory, to companies and hotels, to the magnificent 17th-century Minimes convent where he regularly exhibits. For him, exhibiting is vital.
Like a birth, the artist gives birth to a work that does not begin its life until it leaves the studio.... For a work to live, it has to be seen... For it to have meaning, it has to move sensibilities other than those of the artist, who is only an instrument in the service of that emotion. It is not he who decides the quality, but the skillful blend of the fruit of his inspiration, his sincerity and his self-sacrifice in his work. If his painting seems demonstrative, it is undoubtedly because he is a 'talker' who paints what he cannot say. He puts color and substance where words no longer suffice. "Free inspiration" is probably the expression that best characterizes his work. His need to express himself makes him bulimic, and once inspiration strikes he embarks on painting marathons lasting several weeks or months, without interruption.
His themes are as varied as his techniques (acrylic, oil, collage, watercolor, flat tints, matter).
People sometimes ask her why there are so many differences between her subjects. "Because I have many tastes, desires and moods. I can't concentrate on a single subject when so many are jostling around in my head. It can happen that I have several dozen paintings on different subjects at the same time.
He goes from "femmes objets" (women as objects), a hymn to women, as if to give the lie to this misogynistic expression, to try to find in an object, like an obsession, the suggestion of feminine curves that moves men, to the "braves de comptoir" (counter braves) of the "Gueules cassées" (broken faces) of the bistro, carved out of the material, an inexhaustible source but not necessarily of pure water.
He evokes over-consumption, a sort of satirical and colourful assessment of our era, in which everything is production and communication: an over-detailed portrait, like a brain storming, a melting pot of his ideas.
His beaches, populated by swaddled nymphs, jammed towel to towel, are another example of overconsumption, but on holiday, and populated by nymphs as if to find a dream in this mass idleness, a masquerade of people on holiday.
But there's also the man with a television head, a satirical account of our century, in which we communicate with China or America, but don't know the name of our next-door neighbour. You may communicate, but you remain alone in front of your own window.
His bullfighting is a pretext for a lover of movement and color what could be better than a suit of lights or the detail of a circus, a nod to acrobats and theatre?
