Fire Follows My Hands
Drawing with fire is something I have thought about for years. But it has taken me some time to achieve it.
Fire has always fascinated me. I can still remember the thrill, as a child, of watching a building in flames in the centre of my home town. At the age of 13, I would stamp on cartridges to make them bang and impress the girls. It made pretty sparks, smelt of burnt powder and was altogether very effective.
Later on, at art school I used to sometimes set fire to my palette. This was purely for practical reasons. When the layer of paint got too thick and encrusted I would pour solvent over it and light it up to soften it. I could then scrape the paint off with a knife. Once, to my great surprise, the burning produced a beautiful harmony of colours. That was when I had the idea of applying the process to a canvas. My first attempts failed because in those days I preferred working with bright colours and these lost all “their effect when burnt.
A few years later I was helped by fortune. I was working on a canvas with which I was dissatisfied. I ended up by deciding to burn it on a piece of waste land next to the block of flats I lived in. Unfortunately, the spot I had chosen happened to be very near an electric transformer which I had not seen. There was a very strong wind that day and my fire was threatening to go out so I added great quantities of solvent, glue and varnish. There was a massive explosion which could have easily set fire to the whole place. So I took another of my canvasses, a bigger one, and threw it over the first to put the fire out. Of course, the first canvas was completely burnt but the second was magnificent. That was the start of my series of “dark” paintings.
Little by little, by experimenting with various procedures, I discovered that each material has its own way of burning, with a different kind of flame. The flame would usually follow the lines of the patterns I had drawn. Once it had completed the design it would go out of its own accord.
While continuing with my oil painting I decided work on a much larger scale. I started to draw and burn on the ground. These monumental works started off in a subway of my home district, then moved to the rocky coast of the Black Sea, finally to the Bois de Boulogne in Paris and the sandy banks of the river Loire in France. These are ephemeral works that I want other people to witness. My ambition is to do a few monumental works of 1000 or 2000 metres to show that fire can not only be mastered by scientists but by artists too.
In the same way as a composer would be fascinated to hear his music played by the wind I want to let fire perform my works.