Description
THE REVENANT
March 2024, Paris
One month after Escape Game, in March two thousand twenty-four, as winter was finally letting go, as spring was timidly appearing, at fifty-eight and a half years old, I painted The Revenant, the revenant, the one who returns, and this painting was something different, more personal perhaps, more intimate, more autobiographical, The Revenant showed a human figure — me once again, always me, my disguised self-portraits — who was in the process of returning, reappearing, emerging perhaps, but in what state? alive or dead? human or ghost? present or disappeared? and this ambiguity was at the heart of the painting, the figure of the revenant was both there and not there, visible and invisible, existing and non-existing, exactly like I had been in Paris for twenty years, physically present but socially invisible, biologically alive but symbolically dead in the art world that didn’t recognize me, that didn’t see me, that acted as if I didn’t exist, and so I had become a kind of revenant, a ghost who haunts the margins of the Parisian art system, who exists in the interstices, in the invisible zones, in the forgotten spaces, always returning, always reappearing, refusing to disappear completely despite twenty years of exclusion, twenty years of rejections, twenty years of silence.
The figure of the revenant in my painting was painted in a spectral, ghostly way, I had used pale tones, whites, grays, transparencies that suggested that this figure was not completely solid, not completely present, not completely alive in the usual sense, it was between two states, between life and death, between existence and non-existence, between the visible and the invisible, and its face — my face — had an expression difficult to decipher, was it pain? resignation? determination? muted anger? perhaps all of that at once, mixed, contradictory, complex, like my own emotional state was after twenty years of invisibility, I no longer knew very well what I felt, I was perhaps too tired to feel simple, clear emotions, I was in a kind of intermediate state, zombie perhaps, definitively revenant, continuing to exist by pure inertia, by inexplicable obstinacy, without really knowing why, without really having hope that it would change, just continuing, returning, reappearing, again and again, like a ghost who cannot die, who cannot disappear completely, who eternally haunts the places of its past existence.
And the title — The Revenant — referred of course to that film from two thousand fifteen with Leonardo DiCaprio, this story of a man left for dead in the wilderness who survives against all odds and who returns to take revenge, but my revenant had no one to take revenge on, or rather he had an entire system to take revenge on but how does one take revenge on a system? how does one take revenge on indifference? how does one take revenge on silence? one cannot, one can only continue to exist despite everything, continue to return, continue to reappear, continue to haunt, continue to be there even if no one sees us, even if no one recognizes us, even if we have become ghosts, revenants, spectral presences who are no longer really alive but who are not yet really dead, who exist in this intermediate space, this metaphorical underground where all the excluded live, all the rejected, all the invisible who refuse to disappear completely.
March two thousand twenty-four. Spring returning too, for the twenty-first time since my arrival in Paris, and I was painting this revenant who was me, who was all those who like me had been rejected, excluded, made invisible but who continued anyway, who returned anyway, who reappeared anyway, obstinately, incomprehensibly, as if we could not accept our disappearance, as if something in us refused to die completely, refused to let itself be erased, and this something was perhaps just our fundamental humanity, our need to exist, to create, to leave a trace, even if this trace was invisible, even if no one would ever see it, we had to leave it anyway, we had to return anyway, we had to continue haunting anyway, because that was being human, refusing to disappear completely, continuing to exist even when everything says we should stop, that we should accept our social death, our symbolic non-existence, no, we continued, we returned, we haunted, eternal revenants, obstinate ghosts, spectral presences who didn’t want to, couldn’t, die completely.
The Revenant. March two thousand twenty-four. The spectral figure who always returned. The ghost who haunted the margins. The revenant who refused to die. And I who painted this figure recognizing that it was me, that I had become this revenant, this ghost, this spectral presence who had haunted the Parisian art system for twenty years, invisible but existing, socially dead but obstinately alive, always returning, always reappearing, refusing to disappear completely, always painting, always creating, always existing, despite everything, despite the invisibility, despite the silence, despite the twenty years of rejections, I returned, I was there, I existed, ghost perhaps, revenant certainly, but there anyway, present anyway, alive anyway, to the end, always, eternally, the revenant who never dies completely, who always haunts, who always continues, who always returns.
