At the origin of my artistic vocation, I find in childhood the two lines that guide my gaze. Amazed witness of my mother's emphatic exclamations in front of the beauty of the landscapes, I understand that the source is a powerful feeling of wonder. I take this perception as a founding example. From my father's art restoration workshop, I maintain an uninhibited closeness to artists of all periods and their works. I imagine them as friends inviting themselves to the house, thus promoting intimate exchanges, freed from the sacralization imposed by institutions. Today, the museum represents for me a place of reunion, interspersed with fruitful conversations during long silent contemplations.

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During my art studies, I was introduced to the issues that drive contemporary art. I make all kinds of installations, and even some performances, around the question of the body. If the process of reflection taught fascinates me, the lack of interest, seeing the contempt for drawing and representation by the academic institutions of the time, revolts me. By chance, at the Arts Déco, I push open the door of a live model workshop and meet the gaze of the man who will be my master: the sculptor and draftsman Charles Auffret. Around his benevolent figure and his demanding teaching, draw from model a whole band of young people animated by a living vocation for the arts. Auffret teaches us to contemplate nature, we rid our drawings of the tinsel that clutter them by learning to know ourselves. From this teaching, I treasure the deep admiration for the woman's body and the infinite respect for the person of the model. Later, I was impressed by the work and the radicalism of Alberto Giacometti's research. I imagine his sculptures as terribly dense and luminous diamonds, betraying a man's love for the miracle of life painfully threatened by finitude. It opens up the possibility of a new representation of the world and offers a completely contemporary vigor to such ancient arts as drawing and sculpture. When I left school, I obtained early academic recognition: prizes and above all a two-year residency at the Caza de Velazquez in Madrid.

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For the first time, I have the opportunity to devote myself entirely to my practice. It is a sequence of great creative activity and intellectual emancipation, of extraordinary encounters and social events. Despite these successes, I returned to France steeped in such dizzying doubt that I seriously considered giving up my work. The sculpture and the drawing seem anachronistic to me and I feel deeply disoriented. My all-out research ultimately ends in an identity crisis, I feel mute and empty, as if all this desire for art was just an illusion. However, I continue to work in the solitude of my studio, but from now on I fiercely refuse to show what I do. Inspired by the work of Giacometti and nourished by an observation of nature to burn my eyes, I begin new research around the perception of reality and plastic representation. Over the years, I exercise my gaze, I question the obvious, I explore means and subjects. Powerful enthusiasm seizes on this secret labor, but falls back immediately, drowned by the conviction of the sterility of the enterprise. The pieces made seem grotesque and borrowed to me. At the time, I was far from imagining the consequences of this exile.

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At the Peggy Guggenheim Foundation in Venice, my eyes land on a Dogon statue that strangely resonates with my research. I see in the stylization of this piece the anamorphic perspective that I try in my sculptures. During a conversation, my brother Jean-Baptiste, an Africanist anthropologist, immediately grasped the scientific novelty of this intuition. We are writing an article together that raises a residue of colonial obscurantism on the genius of African statuary and we question the very conception of realism. My work then takes on a whole new dimension when I discover my unconscious, and perhaps risky, affiliation with an entire continent that has been sculpting for centuries with consummate talent. My gaze asserts itself and my sensitivity balances between tradition and contemporaneity, introspection and reception of the external motif. I found where sculpture and painting begin for me, so I decided to devote all my time to my work.