When I started working on these gouaches, two very precise memories came to light. A photograph in an old family album and my experience as a museum keeper. This sepia-colored photograph shows a corner of a workshop where, among plaster and marble studies of different sizes, is a life-size statue representing a Circée whose model, Jeanne Grahaud, wife of the sculptor Antoine Bourlange born in 1872 and died in 1951 in Villeneuve sur Lot, was the sister of my paternal great-grandmother. This Circe, naked woman in the posture «coquette», standing in a contrapposto to the antique has a raised arm leaning nonchalantly against a tree trunk, the other hand on the hip.
 
I imagined hearing whispers between the sculptures of the workshop, talking to each other about family stories with this impression of surprising something in the silence sometimes disturbing statues at the very moment when one enters the room of a museum. The statues would have a secret, that of being silent witnesses of an entire human existence through the history of Art.

During this work I have collected in my workshop a whole set of cut-out paper figurines, photocopies of various sculptures taken for most of my trips, pieces of a puzzle to come, and as we reconstruct the image of a game of patience, Thus taking back to my account this vision of the workshop corner of the family album. Another memory, is that of a courtyard filled with sculptures and pieces of capitals left there in the regional Museum of ancient art of Rouen. Student then at the School of Fine Arts in this city, I present myself to the Departmental Museum of Antiquities to apply for a job as a babysitter during the weekends. I was received by the Conservative in person “old lady” the big bun, sitting behind a huge desk where a set of small fossils and pieces of broken statuettes were placed there in line in front of an impressive underhand of green leather and a superb marble pen case. My application surprised her a little and she asked me about my motives. This lady with a stern air wanted to exchange some words about art with the young student in art that I was. The first day of my engagement, when I went to the metal closet in the basement, it made a very different impression.  Armed with a navy blue blazer for men three times too wide and a visor cap that prevented me from seeing the horizon in its proper place, I got acquainted with my colleagues at work, all men, time obliges, They were amused and satisfied to have finally found a uniform in my size! I was thus charged, among other things, to dust off before the opening of the Museum to the public a large Gallo-Roman mosaic from the third century.  This one was embedded in a kind of pool, it is still. It had been discovered in Lillebonne and was to cover the floor of the dining room of a rich villa. It represented a deer hunt... there was a nymph pursued by a god... a hunting scene began with an offering to Diane, horses, dogs, and deer.

 

In the silence of the still empty room, I had to take off my shoes and socks, broom in hand, and walk from side to side, the 25 square meters of the precious mosaic.  At the opening time, my job was to circulate in the rooms, and the low attendance then of a provincial museum led me to look for hours during the windows not full of sweets but wonderful ancient vases with red and black figures, of cult statuettes, mother goddesses, small terracotta Venus and other mysterious treasures.  Sometimes to fight a feeling of uselessness I escaped from 
antique rooms to discover the department of the Middle Ages. It was entered by a cloister recycled from the former monastery of the Visitation of the seventeenth century. It housed a collection of green stones, lapidary pieces, headless pillars, fragments of sculptures like survivors of a massacre, a courtyard of miracles where the capitals served as pedestals for statues, where the gargoyles laid down on the ground spouted nothing but moss.  I visited my dead every day, this is what I called these sculptures placed there at the end of a long journey. The gods and goddesses had no oracles to render or altars to honor.  The saints tasted there, the true solitude of a stone desert. The hands, the cries, and the prayers of the faithful had abandoned them. 

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I loved this place where we walk without a plan or label, where the objects seem to resist the «chopping menu» of the museum classification when it is the emotion alone that makes us see.  These two intimate experiences could echo the work of gouaches in which I show sculpture rooms or reserves of an imaginary museum where a whole heterogeneous set is piled, a courtyard of miracles or recreation for statues where works of different eras or origins known from the history of art would converse by chance assembled there by taste and affinity or by simple formal play.  Make a Greek goddess neighbor with an African goddess, a Greek Venus with a Hindu goddess, a Buddha, a Ganesh with a kouros, a dancing putti, a fauna with the spider of Louise Bourgeois,  Degas' little dancer with Flanagan’s hare or Giacometti’s walker.  To mirror the multiplicity and richness of our cultures and face the avalanche of images on the networks and other cultural platforms of our contemporary societies serve as an anchor as a brake on waste in a kind of “recycling” of various images and representations, in unusual, unexpected, joyful, sometimes disturbing situations to retain what seems to me to disappear or get lost in the big bazaar of the world.