Working on the puzzle principle

05/04/2021

I have always worked according to the puzzle game principle, that focuses attention on details ...and, from them, step by step, allows to reconstitute the whole...

As a child, I cut pictures from books or memorized them when it was forbidden! As a teenager, I cut out magazines and collected images and quotes on my favorite themes, which I carefully classified to use them as sources of inspiration ...

This was of course before the internet and its avalanche of information, which, when well chosen, are so many treasures...

My artistic practice of leather work as self-taught is the application and the very result of this operation...

Dealing with just a few obvious basic constraints, and accessing plenty of possibilities that give a rare freedom, always searching for the different and the unique ...

The puzzle indeed imposes itself on me as a creative functioning by research, association of images, assembly...

And here is an example of one of the puzzle key pieces that allowed me to design "Hedera"...

The idea of portrait being posed from the start, thanks to an application that gives shape to my ideas without the clumsy intervention of a pencil at this step...

But I needed something more, a strangeness, to make it interesting, and not to produce one portrait among many...

And I had found that oddity some times earlier in the detail of a photo taken in the gardens of "Clos Lucé" manor in Amboise, which houses a Leonardo da Vinci museum...Indeed, one of his famous portraits reproduced on a giant canvas, that of Ginevra Da Benci, stands there on several meters size in the middle of the greenery... and this photo has been taken in a viewing angle that places this Medieval/Renaissance beauty just behind a branch of a weeping willow as if scratching her cheek...

Branches, roots, veins, wrinkles, tears, cracks, scars ?... All symbols can be seen through this incongruity that gives the face a new and completely different meaning...

I did not want to reproduce the Ginevra, it wasn't my goal on this painting...

But just this vertical "scar", this tiny little detail to which others would not have paid attention, or would have spontaneously hidden in the original photography...