Biography

Curriculum Vitae

En Francais

Spending so much time on my own, facing blank canvases, I have had ample time to reflect on my life and get in touch with who I thought I really was. The body of work I produced since 2002 explores my personal experience of settling in a new country, becoming another person as the process of absorption into the new environment is continually qualified by my French cultural background, sometimes leaving me feeling lost, part of neither one nor the other culture.

My work has evolved from a fairly representational style depicting still life objects reflecting not just these different aspects of my background but also the continuing process of migration. Their selection had to do with trying to create a rich domestic environment, taking pleasure in the shapes of things, their color, their symbiotic connection to other objects; all of which are pregnant with the meaning attached to each one of them. These artefacts became a reflection of self, however as they are common objects, every viewer can relate to them in their own way.

With “Les Intemporelles” I leant towards abstraction. My influences, my meditations on my shifting identity, shared in different ways by everyone migrating to a new country, had been internalised and found expression in my paintings as a study in transience. Using layers of rich glazes to translate light, mood and the illusion of underwater weightlessness, I was inviting the viewer into my inner world. My subtle mix of abstraction and hints of a romantic realism created a very seductive drifting reality.

“Le temps beni des colonies” (The good old times of the colonies) produced in Hanoi-Vietnam during 2005 and 2006, explores a collective past, drawing on the history and memory of Vietnam, paying homage to the Vietnam of today. This body of work consists of large mixed media pieces. The images come from postcards dating from French colonial Indochina. Enlarged and printed on canvas, these images were then altered with humour and subtlety by the addition of soci-political comments on “the good old times” of that era. This latest body of work represents a significant development in my work and the combination of digital print technology and traditional oil technics will more than likely shape the future of my work.

“Not Too P.C!”In my 2008/2009 series, titled "Not Too P.C!", I decided to claim my right to freedom of speech. This series stems from my first hand experience of censorship during my 2007 exhibition at Art Vietnam Gallery in Hanoi Vietnam). "Not Too P.C!" remains in the line of my preceding two series in terms of political art, based on recuperation and re-interpretation of the image, better described using the famous motto:" le poids des mots, le choc des photos"(the weight of words, the shock of the photo) of the well known French tabloid Paris Match.

Aesthetically, I tend to work within the "New Pop" art movement, influenced by the likes of Warhol, Lichtenstein and Rauschenberg.