Can you tell us more about your concrete experience of the lockdown ?
Concretely I realized with the lockdown how much I was already living a little confined. I always spend my days in the workshop and usually with myself. At the same time, I also take care of my associative work.
Even if the virus has yet affected very few people in my immediate circle, I am preparing myself.
What is your personal state of mind ?
At first I felt immense despair. The projects I had just evaporated.Then, seeing with admiration how the medical profession had to react, organize itself, innovate to save the sick, I understood why the artist is usually considered to be self-absorbed.. or even selfish.
Finally, between the disgust to see that what we are experiencing globally had highlighted the worst of some politicians and my wonder at how some others could scramble for lives and their people, I said to myself that artists should continue to do act and participate in the awakening of critical thinking and in the construction of consciousnesses. Because this is perhaps one of the multiple powers of art.
Does the lockdown experience have an impact on your art ?
Maybe I was a step ahead of the facts: in 2019, I started a series of drawings directly from a feeling of suffocating insecurity and provoked by the vagaries of weather conditions. I sketched a series called Once upon a time ! which includes this one :
Let’s go now !!! No ? 50X70 cm
Then followed a series of research on characters who, although masked, continued to live ...
NOWAY 30X40 cm
In January 2020, I worked with Ade Adesina :
A L’AUBE 101X147 cm
BIG GANG 50X70 cm
Do you practice your art during the lockdown ? if yes, can you tell us about your new pieces ?
My practice being generally oriented towards the self-portrait, I wanted to present my disgust with certain political decisions and how certain leaders forced their disciples to believe that only God can spare them.
This linocut was produced as part of a project with a Montreal artist Adeline Rognon.
#idontcareanymore 70X50 cm