Mélancolie (Melancholy)
2020 — 2021
Begun during lockdown, this series approaches melancholy as an all-encompassing, literary and poetic feeling. It is a blur between sleep and waking. This is not depression, that malady of the century, but the malady of every century: the age-old dejection of humanity, from Gilgamesh to Kirsten Dunst.
Echoing its depiction in the history of art, Mélancolie offers a step back. The figures are thoroughly contemporary, yet the injunctions to be dynamic, to smile, to be happy do not seem to have subdued them. Their melancholy resists our entertainments: it still has its place. It is a moment of abandon, abandon of the self, not absence from the self; abandon of the world. A sad serenity, in which refusal becomes fertile.
Prométhée Prometheus2021 · 130 × 97 cm
Le spleen du poète The Poet's Spleen2021 · 130 × 97 cm
Le Sommeil d'Endymion The Sleep of Endymion2020 · 130 × 97 cm
Et in Arcadia ego2020 · 130 × 97 cm
Philoctète Philoctetes2020 · 130 × 97 cm
Ophélie Ophelia2020 · 130 × 97 cm
La Mélancolie du vin The Melancholy of Wine2020 · 130 × 97 cm
La Déploration The Lamentation2021 · 195 × 130 cm
La Tristesse du roi The Sorrow of the King2020 · 195 × 130 cm