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2005 No man's land
2004-05 Ruins
2001-03 Hiroshima
2001 Figures
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1994-99 Bedrooms

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2004-05 Ruins
2001-03 Hiroshima
2001 Figures
1998-2000 Landscapes
1994-99 Bedrooms

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On painting
Interview in Paris on February 26 and 27, 2005
by Philippe Villaume and Pascal Bordenave
Translation from French to English by Jacquelyn White

(extract)

P. B.: After “ Hiroshima ” you continued to concentrate on the theme of ruins. Why?
M. B.: I continued the work that I had started with “ Hiroshima ” and therefore I created a series of paintings on Dresden . Both cities are emblematic of destructive folly: Hiroshima was a city devastated by the first atomic bomb, while Dresden , which was bombarded by the allied forces in '45, was a city full of art, not necessarily a military objective. Then I did some paintings on Warsaw , Caen and other cities destroyed during the Second World War.
After “ Hiroshima ” I had the desire to make paintings with a more “accessible” size, representative of the streets cluttered with debris, which suggest a journey through the ruins, while “ Hiroshima ” aims at representing an entire landscape, 360 degrees. In both cases, however, I was interested in showing human folly, its infinite power of devastation. My work as an artist also consists of giving shape to absurdity and chaos.

P. B.: What attracted you to the idea of giving shape to chaos?
M. B.: Chaos is an ambivalent concept in which the representation of destruction and the possibility of reconstruction coexist, it is the moment in which life and death meet. The end and the beginning are confused in chaos; in my paintings chaos is represented by the ruins, therefore by images of destruction, but it's exactly here where life will begin again. I feel I put the observer face to face with a choice; he has the possibility of interpreting the image in an optimistic way or not. In this way having put the streets close up is emblematic of this choice. Contrary to what I had done in the series of crucifixes, I tried to make the images in these paintings ambiguous enough to enable a double interpretation.

P. B.: If it's mountains, seas or bombarded cities you work a lot starting from photographs …
M. B.: Photographs which document an event are really a starting point, and for this reason I always try to find black and white photos, usually photocopies from books. I never use color photographs because I prefer to interpret the colors myself; the photographs are used to capture a certain atmosphere, to place guidelines for the formal construction of the painting, nothing else.

P. B.: In conclusion, looking at your work, in particular the ruins, I get the impression at times that the subject of the painting is only a “pretext” for the pictorial work, that it disappears behind the same material of the painting. Do you agree?
M. B.: Yes, but I think this always happens and it's like that for all artists in my opinion, because it's the painting that gives life to the subject. The subject is a formal idea; it's the interpretation that gives value to the work, not the intention. At the moment I'm working a lot on material: I create a certain thickness on the canvas thanks to different layers of paint, I use a lot of colors, I'm looking for movement, but this has always been tied to the idea of the stratification of the traces of time.
From a technical point of view I almost never know in advance what the result will be, and besides, this is what I like about painting: the painting is created day by day, moment by moment, and varies according to your mood.