(...) I have the feeling that in general, we don't know very well what we are doing. Hence the interest (as far as I am concerned) in seeing this exhibition, hoping that it will make things clearer. So it will be composed of recent paintings (end of last century, beginning of this one) and these paintings (which I'm looking forward to seeing again), even if they are a little bit there because they haven't been sold yet, I guess, participate in a practice that is the one of painting that one can do today. I would say that, in my case, this practice has become a bit intimate and personal and basically indefensible, hence the difficulty of talking about it. At the same time this practice is public, therefore social, economic, critical and political. What I hope is that the exhibition, that is to say, the hanging of these paintings and their visualization, will give them meaning (even importance). If it was necessary to make them, there is of course no need for these paintings to be what they are. The question is therefore what they say, how they say it and why they say it, and I believe that Catherine Perret says it well when she speaks of her exhibition at the Villa Tamaris, of a desintegrated modernity, of an ordinary place and of "the senselessness to which we are delivered". Jean Baudrillard says that there is a fate to art because it claims to escape banality, but elsewhere he complains about this banality and seems to regret the illusions that he denounced? To return to the canvases themselves, what makes a panel covered with colors (or a color) a painting and conversely what makes a painting a panel covered with color(s)? I also have the feeling that by making new paintings, I am correcting or clarifying what I have done before. That's it for today. Best wishes, Olivier
Extract from an e- mail "conversation" of December 7, 2005
