BAGS

Created in 2025, Bags is a series of oil paintings on kraft paper bags measuring 33 × 49 cm.

The choice of this fragile and modest support shifts painting toward an ambiguous territory, somewhere between everyday object and sacred surface. When assembled as polyptychs, the bags sometimes recall the structure of altarpieces or stained-glass windows, as though light itself were passing through the materiality of the paper.

Forms emerge within a raw and tense painting practice, built through masses of color, erasures, and rapid gestures. Figures seem to appear and dissolve within unstable compositions where representation constantly hesitates at the edge of abstraction.

The series naturally enters into dialogue with the intensity of Bram van Velde and the painterly energy of Willem de Kooning. It also carries the deep influence of modern abstract painting encountered during my studies at the Peggy Guggenheim Foundation in Venice.

The support itself resonates with the legacy of Supports/Surfaces, whose influence remained present in the teaching of several of my professors at the École des Beaux-Arts in Aix-en-Provence.

With Bags, painting returns for me to a form of physical and immediate necessity — a direct practice, without ironic distance, in which gesture, color, and material seek above all to bring forth a presence.