Everywhere in the world, Art is a passionate debate. Nothing is ever certain in art, and there is little more I can do here than to chat with you in all sincerity like I would in my studio.

All through my life painting has attempted to discover, under the visible world, traces of an imperious order. Abstract art is nothing but an attempt at undertanding these underlying mechanisms.

What could be labelled my figurative art is an effort to discover in objects and human beings the signs they represent in the world.

I have approached them both in the same spirit, as Mondrian very well remarked, calling me a naturalist painter as soon as he saw me add an oblique line to his orthogonal system.

Nature conceived as a master, as an arranger of forms, of qualities, as a language.

Art is a means for man, amongst others, to exploit his full potentiality, imagination comes after logic, allowing man to reach the areas which escaped it.

The artist - each one in his way - reads in the universe a certain set of values which he tries to communicate to those who are willing to follow him in the process. One could say that art is a way of revealing everything that is art-less, while providing those who care for it the means of enjoying it. Art is understanding through happiness. To separate abstraction from the figure is just as vain as separating what is clear from what is unclear. One tends to reduce the latter to mere description, to the signalling of objects. My path lead me to find out that beings and objects alike created in the world abstract signs: that they shared at a certrain level a common language.
It is like tearing up the veil of utilitarian definitions of the universe. I saw in this discovery a new freedom I wish to share with my contemporaries, with joy and in friendship. It leads, ultimately, to another way of living. To consider the world as the place where abstract currents interwine. That each painter would have to re-create for himself the main stages of painting, everyone knew that since Cezanne and Seurat. I wanted to go further and encompass Poussin, Cimabue and the caves.

This was how, in full absraction, in 1935, I dreamt and already wrote about going as far as Ingres and David - a dream realised only some twenty years later with several paintings currently exhibited (such as "Les Bourgeons" ( the buds) "Lapinerie aux fraises" (Rabbit with strawberries) and"La jeune fille et le mort" ( the young girl and the dead man). Perhaps this constant coming and going can be best explained by the fact that I never believed that truth could be entirely on one side; in everything, the contrary also is true.

Painting, like poetry, is a technique which allows us to live this apparent contradiction. We call the solution beauty. It cannot be defined but must be experienced.

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