It is the first question people ask in front of a canvas, often with a hint of worry, as if there were a right answer to give: “is it abstract or figurative?”
My honest answer is that between the two there is no border. There is a passage.
The real as a starting point, not as a goal
The real holds an important place in my work, but rarely as its purpose. A landscape, a façade, a bouquet, a silhouette or a few objects can provide the initial structure of a work. Their presence lets the eye recognise a space or a form. But that recognition does not oblige the painting to stay faithful to the appearance of its model.
Little by little, the observed elements change function:
- a tree becomes a vertical;
- a stream becomes circulation;
- a façade turns into a juxtaposition of planes;
- a window becomes a sign;
- a stem becomes a line;
- a succession of figures becomes rhythm.
The visible is not suppressed. It gives painting a vocabulary that painting can then make its own.
That is why I do not sort my canvases into two camps. Some abstractions keep an architectural or vegetal memory; some landscapes are organised in a way that brings them close to abstraction; an urban scene can be seen at once as an architecture and as a set of verticals, fragments and coloured masses.
It is not an alternation between figurative periods and abstract ones. It is a continuum.
What does not change from one series to the next
Between 2021 and 2026 my subjects varied a great deal: landscapes, urban architecture, seascapes, flowers, objects, interiors, human figures, references to Jewish memory. One might think of several parallel enquiries carried on at once.
Looking at the whole, the opposite appears. From one series to another the same concerns return: colour as an element of construction, matter and the trace of the gesture, the fragmentation of forms, the role of verticals and repetitions, the tension between surface and depth, and a light that often seems less to illuminate things than to be born of the painting itself.
The subject changes. The questions put to painting remain.
Colour does not describe, it builds
In this passage from motif to form, colour plays the decisive role. It does not merely characterise an object or render the atmosphere of a place: it takes part in the organisation of space itself. The relations between warm and cold masses, light and dark zones, saturations and breaks determine the balance of the composition. A colour can push a form forward or back, separate two planes or, on the contrary, join them.
This function becomes especially visible when traditional perspective weakens. Depth does not disappear: it changes means. In the landscapes it can be born of a succession of coloured masses; in the seascapes, of variations in density and light; in the interiors, of relations between planes; in the abstractions, it is sometimes no more than a tension between two areas of the surface.
What resists: presence
One thing, however, does not let itself be entirely transformed. In my canvases with figures, portraiture and individual identity are not the point: it is the silhouette, the posture, and above all the group that enter the composition as plastic elements. Multiplied, a figure becomes density, then circulation, then rhythm.
But even strongly simplified, a body keeps a particular power to draw the eye. A silhouette can become almost abstract without entirely losing its human character.
Something resists transformation: presence.
So how should one look?
There are no instructions, and certainly no right answer to find. You can start with the subject. Or with a colour. With an odd shape. With a light. With a detail. You can also try to recognise nothing at all and simply follow the movement of the painting. Then come back later, and see something else.
That freedom left to the viewer matters to me. A painting that closes its meaning is quickly exhausted; one that leaves it open can be lived with for years.