Damien B. Contemporary Art Center

PAINTING
These paintings were design to be screened during a special event organized by the faculty of the Sorbonne in Paris. Instead of photographing painted canvases, I chose to create the whole thing on a slide in order to be more of an innovator and cast a more interesting approach to the project. So, I used clear Rodoid Plastic and then mixed a lot of different materials and medias on it.
After my first tests with some Ecolines (water colors), I began to tamper with the media: scratching it, cutting and gluing it back together to create several levels. For this matter, I used different types of glue, each reacting in a different way to the heat of the slide projector, for example, when left long enough inside the machine, some slides would begin to crack slowly, getting the looks of an old varnished painting.
As for the colors, aside the Ecolines, I also used oil paints, Indian Ink, acrylics... All mixed with cotton or fabric pieces, raw fibers, I even set some creations on fire to alter them. Most of these slides were painted inside their little frames, others were painted on a larger support, then cut later on.
I’m able to print the originals thanks to my scanner which allows manual adjustments on any given part. All I have to do then, is to gather all the scans, recreate the original painting and print it with 6 colors on photo paper.

PHOTOGRAPHY
All to often, pictures are only interesting because of their subjects, but not thanks to their technique (light, colors, shadows...). Therefore, they drift apart from the whole creativity of the painting concept. It’s very easy to take a pretty good picture with a good camera, but is the picture creative? Not necessarily.
I so decided to rediscover the creativity linked to the painting act, and not only satisfying myself with a nice cliché. I wanted the results to look as good as a painting but without using any computerized techniques.
To achieve my goal, I mixed lights and paints during the shooting : using a pane of glass on a special frame allowed me to write, draw even paint on this clear support. My model was then installed behind the glass altered both by the writing and the light passing through the colors of the paint. For a special picture series, I also chose to color the model with coal powder and pastels.