Three cities have shaped my artistic influences. 

 

I lived for two years in New York where I discovered an incredible creative permissiveness, a structured chaos and a history that was in perpetual reinvention.

 

Couple years later, I was in Los Angeles. I found light and a scripted version of reality. I stayed 8 years. I painted characters draped in bright colors that recalled “naïve” painters. This is where I had my first exhibition.

 

I then decided to settle in Paris. The grey buildings and somber tones made me give up painting for a while to take up photography. I walked up and down the streets looking for clues, collecting details in order to reclaim these territories as mine.

 

My latest work is a series of collages entitled “Découpages Urbains”. In these, I wanted to create an aesthetic that would allow me to explore visually my reflection on our environment. From one city to another, from one architecture to the next, the traces of the urban landscapes surround, label and smother us. In my many trips, I have tried to capture details defining for me each of the cities I visited: walls with peeling paint, geometric lines shooting through the sky, the multi ethnic heritages and the life I imagine behind those closed blinds.

 

In these artworks, the multiplication of the photos offers a distorting mirror of our urban accumulation. The pulverization of the images imposes a fragmented rhythm, sometime binary. It creates a puzzle in which the hyper city crumbles, multiplies and finally comes together.