I have been painting memory for more than 15 years now...

Memory of places, which I had already tackled at the University of Fine Arts (Les Beaux Arts) (Series Résonance), then my work on Les Clous «The nails» and the long series « Mémoire - peau ». After achieving, at the end of 2017, a series of realistic, expressionist large formats (Les épouvantails) (The scarecrows), expressing our mutism and my helpless gaze on the tragic events that upset our world. But, I had to simplify them then...by dropping out the lines, the expression of the figure, of the picture.

A certain level of maturity allowed me then to express, no longer with the shape but with the pure substance, feelings, and memories, through colors and finally blacks. Painting memory to me, is what is left in me from that figurative time which fades away and gets transformed into simple impressions, until it becomes sensation and abstraction.

Our memory captures particular instants linked to particular places and particular fragrances, the memory of those missing... Intangible traces of elusive past moments, or intimate permanent scars. Unfortunately, our memory does not permanently retain these blurred emotions, secret instants, whether tragic or happy, these precious moments.

Ineluctably, they fade away, disintegrate, are erased and tend to disappear...

Black Lights and Glass Lights :

This work is about a crossing of unexpected territories in my memory. An exploration of these final essential traces. Leaving only pervasive and sensorial memories when everything is pared-down, when everything has been deleted. Letting go. Recreating this memory by giving up traditional cues of the “figural”, shapes, shackles and boundaries.

Not using color anymore, too domineering, excessively leading the beholder towards sensations of purely aesthetic colors. This way, the frames disappear giving way to the very basics. Some name it abstraction or conceptual.

It then gives birth, in these multiple signifying layers, to intimate lights, my rhythmic spaces, free and pure. Encoded scarifications of signifier black.

What a strange sensation out of the silence of black...

Everything is clearly part of true perceptions. First, light, brightness or mattness, smooth or protruding, oil or wax, light linen canvas, hard and rigid wooden panels, or glass mediums. Alchemy also of light clinging to different thick materials, aggregates of bone char or iron oxide black, oil-crushed pigments on stone, kneaded in cooked oil or black oil, heady spike-lavender or turpentine essential oils or in wax.

But the material can’t be worked with simple paint brushes or brushes anymore. One can’t paint in a similar way anymore. This new evolution, this self questioning, compels you to reinvent everything. Create your own tools (Scrapers, scratches, metal blade, plexiglass polished on aluminium, brushes, etc...). To divert others such as: Threshold bars, tiler scrapers, flat metal rulers, ...

I then create and bury my layers of inverted paint. Then, like an archaeologist, I scrape the surface, explore to reveal in these deep blacks, these past instants and (re)discover my memories. While sculpting these silent dark blacks, I freeze a maze of organized signs, scarifications, traces, scars, or sensations, some rhythmic or slow, some precise or uncertain, not by the color anymore but by the material or its thickness.

In these FURROWS, the light reveals, through changing reflections, my memories sliding in these formed streaks, appearing and disappearing at the whim of the random light. In this BLACK LAKE I navigate through these complex encoded mazes that get drowned into the extent of my memory’s black cells, revealing at times these faraway blue memories.

And in GLASS LIGHTS, the convolutions, individual synapses, delicate superimposed furrows get fixed. These unholy stained glasses, double glass panels imprisoning and immobilizing these traces. Splashed by the uncertain light, in the fake transparency of the glass, they find themselves revealed but captured in the deep darkness of oblivion.

Isn’t memory playing bad jokes on me...by trying to close the access to my (our) story...

I remain a polymorphic painter, pursuing my search on memory, scars and material, perpetuating in this vast sphere of abstractions, the ancient techniques to give true durability to my work.

Serge Tenèze,

Black Lights: The Black Lake                Paintings: oil on linen canvas