My approach

When it's time to start the canvas, I start with a Chinese ink drawing. Then, I paint standing up and as quickly as possible to finish the work before sunrise, as I usually paint at night. If I don't finish that night, I continue the next night, and it can last two days or two weeks. For 'L'Atelier dans le Banco' (Gbangbo), it took me a week of preparation and one evening to apply the colors.

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In this painting, I wanted to explore what could follow from Matisse and Derain's Fauvism, themselves searching for the continuation of Seurat's pointillism and Cézanne's color patches, while also considering the achievements of their successors like George Condo's artificial realism and even Basquiat's minimalism/maximalism.

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Thinking a lot about string theory, the idea that primary particles are strings, more or less, and about fractals that I've been seeing everywhere since discovering them a few years ago, I decided to take one of these strings and stretch it in the most natural direction for me: the direction of my handwriting, diagonally to the right. Stretched like a guitar string and fractalized, meaning creating the entire work with this line (string) to make a unified work.

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But as rules often need to be broken to discover new openings, as I analyzed in Thomas Kuhn's book 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,' here the rule was the necessity of using a single style for a work to make it harmonious. Stenka had taught me this with appropriate examples, showing me the mistakes in the works that painters brought to him for his critical advice and judgment. I decided to break it to create something new by inserting color patches in at least three places.

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December 31, 2023. The scene depicted in 'L'Atelier dans le Banco' is inspired by Banco National Park (Gbangbo) in Côte d'Ivoire, which I visited for the first time two years ago. The idea to turn it into a work of art began to germinate at that time.

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Price: $7000