Kounscha

The work

Three series,
one gaze.

First, what one takes for branches and which is not: proliferations, outgrowths, a thought that grows by branching and links itself module to module. An arborescence — the very one that organises the painter's mind.

On the other, faces coming undone. An infantry collar bears a regiment's number, a jaw is missing, a cheek has withdrawn like a tide. These paintings come from the reconstructed faces of the post-war years, and they refuse pathos: the gazes are frontal, almost calm, and it is that calm that holds the viewer.

Outside, inside — and elsewhere. What the world did to the flesh of others, what grows inside a head, and the landscapes where all of it might live. Life moving toward death, in a burst of beauty.

About

A world
long kept secret.

Seven years old. On a pavement in his childhood town, three or four old men turn as one. Their faces bear terrible scars, and they are trying to smile. The child does not look away — he is fascinated. He understands that day that these men come from a world that has closed behind them, that time passes over faces. He does not yet know that they bear a name — les gueules cassées, the broken faces of the Great War — nor that he will spend his life returning to them. All around, a wild, telluric landscape that pushes a child to invent other worlds.

Drawing since always; a first canvas sold at twelve. Fine art school, a leading animation school, then long years of layout work in the studios of an American animation giant, from France to Los Angeles: building the scene, setting the stage, and seeking the organic wherever it could slip in, down to the vines and mosses of animated jungles. A fascinating trade, and a mould. Twenty years then spent passing the craft on; five years ago, the return to painting — today full time. In between, a reset: unlearning the imposed form to recover his own hand.

For thirty years, painting remained a secret world — a few canvases passed on to close friends, nothing shown. This site is its first open door. A first solo exhibition, devoted to the gueules cassées, is being prepared for 2027.

The work is done in oil, in glazes, with the time this demands and the serendipity it allows. Analogue, human, by hand, in reference to the old masters — where Rembrandt collides with Bouguereau. What to remember fits in three sentences: terrible things can hold true beauty. They take nothing away from the human. They are life.