My work focuses on human figures in landscapes, following a long standing tradition stemming from Renaissance iconography to Picasso’s Bacchanalian scenes and Willem De Kooning’s Women series. This type of subject matter provides me with a starting point through a compelling, universal theme that offers many variations, depending on the figures represented. The figure itself merely acts a catalyst that enables me to hold onto an intuitive feeling or emotion long enough to keep pushing the painting forward. As of late, I have been drawn to painting characters that hold a middle ground between the material world and the divine order: the Musician, the Alchemist, or the wizard Merlin, for instance. More often than not, these figures enable me to enact a symbolic form of self-portraiture, where the painter — in this technology-driven world evolving at a fast pace — is seen as both the recipient of a millenary tradition and a ruptured entity bound to contemporary forms of alienation, forced to radically reinvent itself to bring about new forms of reality. The landscape then becomes a reflection of the internal struggles of the subject.

In particular, musical personas (minstrels, flutists etc.) evoke to me the Greek tradition of Bacchanalia, the mythology of the Muses and Plato’s interpretation of mousikê (in the Phaedrus dialogue, notably) — the philosopher seeing it as a link between the divine and the worldly. In my mind, the Muses’ relationship to both Dionysos and Apollo — halfway between chaos and order, or limitless being and limited being — gives musical figures a mediative nature. In the Christian book of revelations, musical instruments (trumpets) are also notoriously linked to the revelation of the divine truth to men on Judgment Day. The musical figure thus announces the advent of something otherworldly and ineffable. 

There is also a formal reason as to why I always paint figures in landscapes, which relates to the aforementioned personas. I feel this type of subject matter is the best place for a dialogue to naturally occur between figuration and abstraction, between subject and object, as it becomes unclear where the figure ends and the landscape begins. De Kooning, who made both figurative and abstract art at various points in his career — sometimes concurrently —, was very acute to the contradictory nature of representation. Heavily criticised by his abstract-expressionist peers for returning to figuration in his Women series, the Dutch-American painter notoriously refused the false-dichotomy, asserting that "even abstract shapes must have a likeness”. And in a legendary and emblematic exchange between him and the art critic Clement Greenberg, the latter questioned whether a truly modern artist could justify figurative painting: "In today's world, it's impossible to paint a face." De Kooning's unforgettable answer: "That's right. And it's impossible not to." Compare that to Adrian Ghenie’s recent statement that “Every face is a landscape”, and you have essentially the same idea viewed from a different angle.

Hegel defines the dialectical moment, which expresses this contradiction, as “the self–sublation of finite determinations and their passage into their opposites”. Nourished by his metaphysics, I see figures in landscapes as the perfect place where Subject and Object can identify, as face of the Absolute Subject — the harmony between the parts — calls upon us within every shape. To me, the reciprocal exchange between determinate and indeterminate being, between figuration and abstraction on canvas, then constitutes a religious act of creation, during which I can partake at my own scale to the advent of something true and beautiful.

I have been drawing for as long as I can remember. I grew up in Singapore and Hong-Kong, and came back to France with my family when I was eight. Most of what I remember from my early childhood is the colours and patterns of South-East Asia. Much later, I started my higher education in France with formal training to prepare the competitive entrance into top French management schools. During these years, I developed a fascination with mathematics and a deep interest in philosophy, before I was admitted to HEC Paris in 2013. In parallel with my management studies, I then spent two years learning academic oil-painting by copying the works of old masters under the guidance of the painter Élise Chaigneau (Atelier Bella Copia) and studying art history. In 2019, I showcased my paintings and works on paper in a group exhibition entitled La chair que l’on montre aux curieux by the art collective YEA at 59 Rivoli. After that, I stopped producing art for a while, taking up work as a mathematics teacher in Parisian Catholic schools and reading philosophy classics (mainly Plato, Nicolas of Cusa, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant and Hegel) to deepen my understanding of metaphysics. The past two years, I have renewed my focus on painting.