aWANTEDmag.com, Inc

Whether as a child or during the first part of your career, who or what were your earliest artistic influences?

As a teenager growing up in France, we read and studied the poetry of Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Verlaine in school. I

remember how hard it was to get into their work and to rid myself of the strange numbness, which I felt prevented me from fully

appreciating their work, was the ultimate artistic quest of my youth.

“Les poetes maudits” (the poets living outside society) had disdain for all things bourgeois and they worked hard in order to reach new, creative heights through the “dereglement des sens” or the un-ruling of the senses prescribed by Rimbaud. Such avant-garde sensibilities resonated centuries later, in the punk movement and in the songs of Patti Smith and in Richard Hell’s “Blank Generation.” Punk is one of the most important cultural phenomena of our times.

How have those influences carried through to your work today?

I showed some of my new prints at the Bowman/Bloom gallery in the “Nincompatibles” show. Walking around my neighborhood with my dog, I find images and messages inscribed in fresh cement on the sidewalk and I make mono-prints from these engravings.
Not so long ago, I attended a reading by Richard Hell at the New Museum where at one point, he read his own translation of a portion of “Invitation Au Voyage”, a Baudelaire poem; I was really moved by the reading. I would like to publish my prints and asked Richard if we could do a book together. What would be more appropriate than his translation of “Invitation Au Voyage” alongside my prints? The prints would not only accompany and illustrate the text but also echo “le flaneur”, someone who walks the city in order to experience it.

Hailing from Paris, did you ever view American artists/art any differently than that of either France or other countries?

At the Beaux-Arts School in Paris, I was fortunate enough to study with the great art historian, Gaetan Picon. He was amazing when he talked about the abstract expressionists but his class stopped at the works of Mark Rothko.

At the time, there was not a lot of creative energy in Paris -no vital artistic community. My friends and I were into Duchamp, conceptual art, installation art. We were also into the work of contemporary American artists. As we were reading ArtForum, the big shots then were Barry Le Va and Mel Bochner. However, most of the time, we were just sitting in cafes, talking and playing on the pinball machines.

In contrast, during my first trip to New York, I visited artists who were painting away in their huge SoHo lofts. What I witnessed was more than the rational mind at work and it felt liberating somehow.

How is American culture and landscape conveyed through your work and has it changed over the years since you have lived here?

Shortly after my first trip to New York, my friend and artist Annie Ratti, encouraged me to apply to the Whitney Program. Annie introduced me to the head of the program, Ron Clark, while he was in Paris, Ron and I talked about the work of various philosophers I was studying -Deleuze, Guattari and Barthes.

I was later accepted to the program and moved to New York. I struggled with English but the program’s weekly artist visits, which included guest speakers such as Vito Acconci and Phil Glass, were extremely valuable.

The whole question of national identity bugs me. To have both cultures creates a situation that fosters creativity but as I have been working here in the U.S. for more than two decades, I can say for no other reasons that what I make is American art.

Would you say your work is driven by form or content? (As in, does it develop from an idea/seek to express an idea, or is it more about formal aspects)

I’m definitely into the conceptual end however art is still experienced physically. Marcel Duchamp came up with the “ready-made” and the origin of the loss of the origin. In my new prints, I claim the loss of the origin, the death of the traditional craft, meaning the secular condition of an artwork. With Duchamp, in place of the object came the sentence that manifests the anything of the artistic status. In place of “to make” came the sentence spelling the law of modernity “Fais n’importe quoi”. It could translate as “do whatever”. “There is nothing to look at”, writes Didi Huberman in his great catalogue essay for the beautiful show I saw years ago at the Pompidou Center “L’empreinte”, because there is no craft, no artistic work. There is no artistic work because there is only an imprint, which is a mechanical reproduction of reality.

How does your environment (i.e. hometown, cityscapes, rural landscapes, etc.) affect the work you create?

Everyone here was affected by 9/11. It’s a coincidence that as I was going through my files and as the Towers were falling, I was holding an old print I had worked with before and saved --a scene of a panic on the Brooklyn Bridge on Memorial Day in 1883. It’s a bit of an obsession but this particular wood engraving continues to fascinate me. It has served as inspiration as I have enlarged it, cropped it, made drawings and embroideries from it. Some of the drawings were published with a text on panic by the French theorist Sylvere Lotringer. Nevertheless, I’m still not done with this engraving as I am now working more between legibility and abstraction.

How significant is the contrast of using centuries-old techniques such as engraving, etching and printmaking in creating modern art?

I’m interested in paradoxes within singular forms. The works I showed in “Nincompatibles” are not in any chronological order. In old printmaking techniques such as the wood engraving of the late 1800’s or in the rudimentary sidewalk engravings, one can feel the body at work speaking in silence and perceiving the geographical aspect of the markings. These prints are dialectical images: something that tells us as much about the contact (the hand carving the markings) than the loss (the absence of the hand in the print).