Recherches 19- research grant exhibition TAMAT- Tournai, Belgium-2019

Praise of the stain

I am a painter, I work with color and its physical and emotional impact. I love clothing and I integrated it into my artistic practice with regard to painting, as a full-fledged medium, between sculpture and human envelope.
When I started my research at TAMAT, it was a question of reexamining the relationship between clothing and painting, and I chose dyeing as the link between textile and chromatism. I chose vegetable dyeing because it is unstable, uncertain, domestic and a bit culinary. Avocado, red cabbage, madder, campêche wood, birch, indigo, everything has its place. I test textiles, wool, linen, silk, cotton, their weaving too. The pots, the burnt fingers, blackened by indigo and the stains...I try not to make it, I try to avoid the irregular colors. But impossible, the pots are too small for the length I use, my hands are too dirty to avoid traces. The colors are magnificient after the first bath and then after several ones, they mix, get dirty.
The color becomes a set of stains which transforms the dye into a painting, shapes, plans appear there. The dyeing succeeds in the gesture of painting. The washed-out, greyish colors take on a higher profile alongside the clear colors, they show their quality. I gather the colored canvases, I paint by assembling fabrics, painting takes on volume. On the wire, where the dyed pieces hang to dry, drapes appear, shapes with cut-outs that evoke the pattern, and the garment emerges.

By sewing stained, poorly rinsed, runny colors, it is a pictorial material that takes the shape of cloting. Stains give body and history to the garments.The surface contrasts with the inside, the lining agains the envelope; the dirty is sometimes outside, sometimes inside.
Thanks to the dye, the stain becomes the territory of the color that unfolds its accidents, its expressions. I made it my tool.