Self-taught at the margins of institutional networks, my work has been built upon personal experience and the discovery of Nouveaux Réalistes like Jacques-Yves Bruel.
It began with paleontology: I started putting together a collection of oddities in 1974.
Then there was the body, and orthopedics in particular: in 1986, I completed an Advanced Technician’s Certificate in prosthetics (the creation of legs, arms and corset prostheses.)
Egypt, where I lived in 1988.
Hell was an accident I experienced, in a flying saucer during the Carnival of Lunel. I spent some time in the burn unit of intensive care with the severely wounded as a result. Hell was also up close and personal when I did my national service as a medical assistant at the National Institute for the Disabled, the last survivors of World War were there to remind me.
The sea, is a place that I have dived in, hunted in, lived in, and if I add it all up: I have spent two years and half completely underwater.
The alchemy that informs paleontology, underwater hunting and orthopedics all led me to question man’s relationship with nature and with himself. What I do is inseparable from my process. My work is therefore centered around several major themes: hell, the ark, hunting and the Bibigloo… To synthesize these vantage points, plastic is my preferred medium.
Why plastic ? Because if being bipedal, making tools, laughing and consciousness are no longer our nature, that nature is to be found elsewhere. Man’s nature is undoubtedly his phenomenal appetite for selfdestruction and coming up with gimmicks and useless, if not outlandish, garbage. Plastic is everywhere, having multiples of everything is the norm in everyday life, just as it is in contemporary art.
In these everyday objects I have sought out hidden forms – both anthropomorphic and animal – that anonymous designers had in mind; it is Light in particular that reveals form to me. To give plastic the place it deserves – notably as the 5th element – I have worked relentlessly with two universally distributed icons: polyethylene containers and traffic cones from Lübeck.
Using familiar accessories, conceived of in an eminently contemporary material, my work has been examining our relationship with the environment and our capacity to face contradictions created by garbage since 1991.
My approach also questions our perception of public space. My installations, whether durable or ephemeral, most often showcase a magical bestiary that highlights the convergence of plastic objects and animal forms.
My work, installed in alternative spaces a few years back, now circles the globe.
My approach, however, remains playful and above all ironic.