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Shall We Break the Mirror? (2020–2025)
Paintings, Drawings, Film

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Painting to Break the Ice

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I wish I could break through the pane of glass that stands between reality and me, and stop seeing my own reflection superimposed on whatever I look at.

I wish I could break the ice between another person and myself, between myself and myself.

But how?

For more than thirty years, I have drawn and painted models posing before me. With each encounter, I am struck by the vulnerability of a body exposed, naked, to my gaze. Perhaps I am all the more moved because I myself find it so difficult to exhibit my paintings — and to expose myself to the gaze of others. Is it in order to confront this fear that I have painted stories about looking and being looked at, from Diana Surprised by Actaeon to Susanna and the Elders?

What is at stake in the encounter between the painter and the model?

Is it a relationship of desire, love, trust, domination, or surrender?

Who is really looking at whom? Who shapes whom?

Video showcasing the paintings, 3'54, 2025

        What the mirror reflects 

 

 

1: Face to face

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Is there a specifically male gaze upon the naked female body?

Is there a specifically female gaze upon the naked male body?

Quite frankly, I don’t know.

I am simply trying to represent what I see and what I feel when faced with the person posing before me.

.2 : Doubling

In 2021, I made a series of paintings with a young woman who was learning to draw, and whose doubts reminded me of my own.

I placed mirrors around my studio so that they reflected both her image and mine.

I made puppets in our likenesses, which she slipped onto her hands to box with the painter’s reflection in the mirror before her.

.3 : Masks

One day, this young model came to the studio with two white theatre masks, one for her and one for me. She posed wearing hers.

In the painting, I added two further masks, this time bearing our own faces, as though the model could choose between her mask and mine, between her identity and my own.

I then went to the Musée du Quai Branly to draw masks from different traditions. I painted them around the model’s naked body. Their presence gradually transforms the scene into a ritual in which identity seems to waver, as though several different figures might inhabit her in turn.

Break the mirror?

1. A Film — The Painter and the Model

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While drawing young models, I remembered a short-film screenplay I had written in 1997 but never filmed: The Skeleton and Sappho. It was inspired by an encounter I had at the age of twenty-eight with a seventy-year-old woman painter for whom I had posed as a model.

The roles had now been reversed: I had, in turn, become the painter looking at young women.

I returned to the screenplay and rewrote it completely, drawing on the paintings I had made around mirrors, masks and puppets. In this way, the film grew out of the paintings just as the paintings themselves were nourished by the film.

I chose to play the painter myself so that the act of painting could be filmed as it really happens: the first gesture on the canvas, the hesitations, the revisions, the gradual emergence of the drawn body. I wanted the film to show not only a story, but also the birth of an image.

2.  Paintings created during the filming (2023-2025)

During the filming of The Painter and the Model, I drew and painted the actress playing the model.

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This series revisits the earlier paintings made in 2021–2022. The experience of making the film does not simply repeat them: it gives them a new story, shaped by the dialogue and by the relationship that gradually develops between the two characters.

3.    Get Lost, Narcissus ! (2025)

A young man is boxing his reflection in an attempt to break the mirror.

Or perhaps... to go through the looking glass?

During the filming of The Painter and the Model , I painted another series of canvases on the relationship between the painter and her model, this time inspired by the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, with a third young woman as model.

 

Like Cocteau's Orpheus, I wanted to cross through the looking glass.

 

 

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