If we seek truth in painting, it is not a question of seeing what the painting depicts, but of seeing according to what it makes visible. "Rather than seeing the painting, I see according to the painting and with it”. Je ne regarde pas le tableau comme on regard une chose, for what matters here is not a voir cecì but a voir selon. By capturing the gaze, painting frees the eye from all objective representation, touches it, overturns it, cuts it, as in the famous opening sequence of Buñuel's Un chien andalou. But the gaze is then indiscernible from la texture imaginaire du reél which, in painting, becomes the world.

"The eye sees the world, what the world lacks to be a painting".

In painting, what is at stake is that gap, a remainder or a lack, which at the same time expresses a whole. The mountains, or rather the Mont Blanc massif, concede itself to the gaze but do not reveal their essence, since it resides in the multiple forms of their continuous mutation. And it is only when one is able to hear the almost silent resonance emitted by the mountains that the archaic veils make way for an ephemeral vision. An apparition as the first gesture made, I am here, where I cannot escape, not my duty but my passion. I do not want to touch something that is more alive than my memory. Nothing I imagine, but if I can still discern fragments of the world's consciousness, and return to what is below, to what is above, to what is in front of me, then I can truly recognise everything behind. The smell of the earth tamed by fire. I know for sure that they are next to each other, up to the eaves. I shut myself up, the work has begun.