Outside

Concept

For several years now, I have focused my pictorial activity on the imaginary world of forests.
It is in the forest that my drawings are developed, a place of catharsis where the three elements reigns; mineral, plant and animal intermingle, a space where the human psyche confronts itself.
This place (topos) becomes the scene of the collective unconscious, the cultural imaginary at its roots in this collective unconscious, which slips into our dreams, and our psyche identifies the forest as a great image of our unconscious.
The symbolic image of the forest is closely linked to the man-image-body constellation, and its etymology is significant, since the Latin word “foresti, foresta” means “outside”, “away” and it is all the stake of this metonymy, the conscious is put aside, outside the unconscious, the man is put aside, outside the forests.
The forest is not just one symbol among many; it is the symbol of symbolism.
And I would like to quote an author who shed light on the imaginary world of forests in his essay on the Western imagination, published by Champs / Flammarion, Robert Harrison (page 287) ... We generally translate the Greek word logos by language, but originally it means relationship ... it connects men to nature in the mode of openness and difference. It is in him that we inhabit and through him that we enter into relationship with such and such a place. Without logos there is no place, there is only habitat, nothing but niche, no residence, nothing but sustenance. In short, the logos is what man makes his home on earth. This domicile is designated by the word
"Ecology". In Greek, oikos means house, domicile the Latin domus. Thus the word ecology designates much more than the science of ecosystems; it designates being to the universal human world ... We do not reside in nature, but in our relationship to nature. We do not inhabit the earth, but its overtaking. We do not live in the forest, but in an area outside its fence.
Today all my work as a plastic artist is based on the fragility of this consequence: the forgetting of this exclusion that has existed for millennia between man and the forest and which is complicit in its destruction.
Just as the conscious perceives itself outside the unconscious because we think we exist outside of ourselves -projection- I would like to reintroduce not man into the forest but the forest into man.