Writing

My practice is primarily pictorial and works by series : those vulnerable moments (2016) is a series of portraits of old and deep friendships. Also, I have continued on some series for several years : the sleeping ones (since 2014), the awakened ones(since 2019), women’s stories(since 2020). As time went on, I’ve grown in the need for space and to explore a practice of the monumental with, for example, a polyptych of 9m x 180 cm (2020).

Dance is a parallel with a collective creation For The Best(2017 – 2019) on “women’s work” and Dance painting (2020), a personal creation : a way to translate into dance and with my own body the way I paint. Once in a while I also like to approach this theme of the feminine through writing according to specific projects, The volume (with works such as screens (2017) or the series The desires carried (2020), ceramic or plaster dress as many dreamed ways to dress or inhabit one’s own body. Moreover, drawing is quite common in my practice: the series the unfoldings of oneself (2020 -2022) and Les portraits retournées (2020) came out from that desire to trace on supports: some rolls brought back from Vietnam and others, Camel bones, brought from India. The voices (2020) gather small portraits revisited suffragettes. It extends the series Les anonymes-Les Abimées (2016), portraits of prostitutes of the 19th century, a tribute that I pay to those women whom courage and boldness must revive through history and art. The missing images (2016) after old erotic engravings and checkers game (chess game in resin, glass and paper, 2016) question this subjective limit of eroticism in the image. Finally, What Sticks To Us (2016) is a small work of representation of tattooed skin as one writes down a world or a story on one’s own body.

The body, the memory of the body, the body before the thought,pieces of the body are displayed on the canvas as if a part of oneself could not renounce its wild side, its instinctive presence : the body forgets itself to become a mere presence.
Then a world of possibilities is formed that connects a landscape, an animal, a plant and bodies that hide in the pattern until they get lost. Painting shows what it hides. Painting is a game of imagination, bouncing and gliding. A short line in matter. I draw, I draw from myself, I explore the discovery of my hands. I turn around the canvas under the sun as one dances. I seek, the right gesture, rhythm, chromatic relationships that surprise me. I exhaust, I erase, I take off, I move, I spill, temper, rag, heat, repeins some layers, I try to go a little further away to find what needs to be there.

It’s a nude nudity to paint true, to be close, to be skin, between oneself and the world, in the intimate relationship, this is the crossing of painting. Let the impulses, the forces, the hesitations, the fragilities as many degrees of possible presence of being, of costumes of days. Being there without being there. Sleeping, dreaming, producing images, painting. If the painter is a smuggler of emotions, it is also to offer a time to rest, to dream, to escape. We dream like we produce images in this big bed that the world is, in each of us
In Intimate, in 2014, François Jullien said: « We don’t think about talking about intimacy ». Now, I believe this is the place of painting, the place of emotions and stories that are told in the great History, the place of the lace of the folds, the unspeakable and the desires, the place where we dive into, the saving poetry of the world.

Cover of Secret Voice of Painter, Florence DUSSUYER, 2022