"It's what I do that teaches me what I'm looking for"
Pierre Soulages
I was born in Beirut, in 1963, for a French father and a Bolivian mother.
I grew up in Paris, and as far as I can remember, art has always had a prominent place in my life:
My first images are in our apartment, alongside my mother, pencil or brush in hand.
A few years later, in 1972, my father opened an art gallery in the Marais, and I remember the visits to artists' studios, visits to museums and openings.....
In 1981 I decided to study fashion styling, but very quickly I realised that I couldn't find exactly what I was looking for. Growing up between 2 cultures leaves a lot of space for the imagination and dreams. I was passionate about Latin American literature, and particularly Garcia Marquez, Ernesto Sabato, Alejo Carpentier. It was at the age of 23, after visiting an exhibition by the painter Armando Morales, Galerie Claude Bernard, in Paris, that a revelation occurred: A necessity to study painting. So I went to Bolivia, in search of my roots, and I started to study painting at the Gonzalo Rodriguez studio, in La Paz. A year later, I returned to France where I was admitted to the Leonardo Cremonini workshop, at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts in Paris. Fundamental meeting with a generous and demanding master. The privilege of studying in this school is that it’s located on the other side of the Seine, in front of the Louvre, thus almost daily access to the paintings of the great masters.
After leaving Fine Arts, my first works were marked by the influence of this double culture, very close to Latin American painting. I started exhibiting in France, Bolivia and the United States in 1992. In 1997, after visiting an exhibition on Byzantine art in New York, my painting took another direction. Being passionate about the search for light, I started to introduce leaves of copper and aluminum, to evoke space, like a metaphor, search for interior light.
Through this process, light emerges from the canvas, a search for the essential.
In 2010, I left Paris with my family to settle in Australia. This new change of life and landscape influenced my new work. In a natural way, space is introduced, particularly in the last series of paintings: the "bushfires". Colour has also reappeared, as an obligatory response to this country bathed in light.