Tache

The drawings in the Tache series are made from photographic images stained with water. Water stains themselves become the very subject of the work.

“One day, water fell onto an inkjet digital print I was using. The stain revealed a much more saturated intensity of colours that detached from the image and settled at the edge of the water’s passage. At the same time as this revelation, the water stain created a fading and a recession of the image. It was from this event that the idea for the series was born: to fix, through the insistence and endurance of repetitive drawing, the temporary and elusive nature of chance”, the artist explains.

“Among other experiments, extremely diluted Chinese ink, bordering on watercolour, is one of the materials I prioritise in my research on drawing. I appreciate and make use of its random and uncertain nature, which is difficult to control. The superimposition of pencil lines and ink stains allows the readability of the image to be blurred. Thus, rather than the image itself, my research focuses on its emergence — the process through which it comes into being. For the image to fully reveal itself, it requires a period of observation, which becomes an invitation to contemplation”.

The contemporary photographs used for the series of drawings come from the collection of the Museum of La Roche-sur-Yon. The works are created in several stages. Deliberate chance — the action of water — remains an unpredictable intervention that makes the original subject gradually recede. Thus, the figurative image approaches abstraction. Water here is both destructive — in deforming and erasing the original image — and creative, producing a new image with an accumulation of unfamiliar colours and forms.