Fourteen years of looking at the same stretch of water

I was born in Sète in 1988 and moved along the coast to Marseille at nineteen, which is where the paintings have come from ever since.

Everything starts outdoors. I take rubbings off dock walls and salt stores, make small oil studies in weather that is usually too rough for it, and carry all of that back to a former chandlery on the north quay. What happens next is mostly subtraction. The pigment goes on coarse and dry so that it sits proud of the linen, then gets scraped, sealed and put down again. Most canvases lose four or five complete surfaces before they arrive at the one that stays.

I show through Hessen-Ruiz and work directly with collectors on commissions. I answer my own email, I visit the room a painting is going into whenever the distance allows, and I would rather turn down work than make something I would not want to see again in ten years.