What inspires you to become a portrait artist?

I started to be interested in art and figures, drawing and painting at a very young age. There are artists in my family, including my uncle. My uncle’s early paintings filled the walls of my grandmother’s house.

So I started drawing at a very young age, so much so that my primary school teacher gave me advice because he saw my interest. I drew my friends and classmates very early. I had chosen an art option in high school and my teacher advised me to go to art school. But I preferred to study philosophy, in particular to understand why some people said that painting was dead.

After a few years of teaching philosophy, I chose painting, portraiture and nudes. I became a portraitist in the sense that I seek to bring to life characters, thoughts, experiences, existential postures through faces and bodies. I do not do artisanal portraits whose vocation was simply to represent a person even if there are also many possibilities through a simple portrait. The face and the body are what best express life in all its density. Showing life with a look, a body, its intensity and all the nuances, the language of the body is a complex and rich thing.

Can you tell us about your portrait pictures? As a portrait artist, which artistic and philosophical movements influenced you when creating your artworks?

My portraits are often multiple and are therefore more compositions, scenes than simple portraits. The greatest influence and inspiration comes to me from Renaissance painters, the Italians but also the Flemish.

The Renaissance artists wanted to be thinkers, scholars, men of letters and philosophers. I also feel influenced by a philosopher painter like Nicolas Poussin and certain painters of modernity.

Who are the portrait artists that have influenced you the most? How have their works influenced your own work?

I don’t have a favorite painter but many painters inspire me with their singularity and their way of constructing both a sensitive and conceptual discourse. The richness of the works of the greatest artists is a challenge to be renewed. This is how I experience it and this is what nourishes my work. I always paint as if I were philosophizing, I think but with images rather than words. Images that carry within them a discourse, a complex and often double-faced truth, in other words aphorisms.

What is the message you want to give in your portraits? Do you handle the themes of “evidence of existence” and “beauty” in your portraits?

The purpose is neither beauty nor the illustration of a philosophical thesis but a painting that leads to reflection, to the thought of a multiple and moving existential truth.

I do not want to convey univocal messages or simplistic moral precepts but rather paradoxes, ambivalences. I seek to show the complex of existence and of all experience. The complexity of incarnation and sensation. Painting is also there to arouse desire, in particular the desire for life and beauty is something that provokes this momentum. Even if it is difficult to define what is beautiful, however there are whatever one says balances, harmonies that have an invigorating impact and others less or not. So yes I speak of existence, pain, ambivalence, fear, desire, eroticism and beauty in my paintings.

Can we get an impression of the feelings and thoughts of people at that time by looking at a portrait picture?

Absolutely, when looking at a work of art or a portrait, we perceive the values and beliefs of the era that created them. It is the strength of art to be a witness to what is desired, the beliefs and fears of an era. However, there is a condition for this, that is that the artist agrees to be part of his era and does not just copy in a disembodied way works and styles of the past. It is possible to make portraits in the manner of … realism, Fauvism, impressionism, expressionism while varying the point of view and therefore bearing witness to his era, but it also happens and often that the painter is content to only copy while forgetting the world in which he is immersed.

What is a Picture Aphorism? How is it used in a portrait picture? What is the importance of aphorisms in portrait picture?

A pictorial aphorism is the same as a classical aphorism, that is, a statement, a thought that provokes other thoughts. The only difference is that it is a language made of colors and shapes instead of words and sounds.

The pictorial aphorisms are mainly my compositions, where bodies and people are sometimes staged with evocative elements such as chains, candles, mirrors,  metro bars, etc.

Western painting in particular has long had the vocation to edify and instruct, as was the case with great religious painting or paintings depicting episodes from mythology. In this sense, I am not inventing anything, I am only reactivating one of the great vocations of painting. Even if it is no longer a question of teaching a religious or moral discourse, since the paintings are mainly concerned with invoking a critical, political and existential vision.

What advice do you have for those who want to become portrait artists and art aphorists? What kind of training should they receive in this regard?

Today, painting is often either purely retinal or conceptual in the poor sense… I am making the same bet as the artists of the Renaissance… The painter is the equal of a thinker, he does not illustrate but interprets in the strong sense and he thinks about the world, politics, history, the past through his language, a pictorial language… He shows what it feels like to live, to exist, to know, to be in the world… how do we contemporaries live and inhabit the world… Several of my works have an existential but also political dimension because they engage values… A specific discourse on existence and life. And that is also why I do self-portraits… It is a desire to embody my words and my thoughts to the end… I think, I philosophize through painting… I show a vision, an interpretation, an exploration of a personal thought…

The only advice is therefore to think, to observe the great masters, to listen to the murmur of the world, of men. To not be afraid to embody one’s work and to affirm one’s being in the world. Living is a unique and short experience, and painting is one of the most beautiful ways to bear witness to what it feels like to live, to be a body in a moving and enigmatic world.