Ratel C

I walk in the countryside until I find an illegal dumping ground, where pieces of furniture, anonymous pieces of art, wooden boxes... lie together in great disharmony. Sometimes I free dive around an island until i find pieces of boats and discarded objects that i bring back to the surface. Fly-tipping in the oceans and the forests is still very common. It doesn't take long to find interesting items. I come back to the same location and i harvest free newspapers, recycled before being read. Commercial Kleenex, whose existence lasts for the fraction of a second if you consider the age of the stones and of the planet earth they spoil by contaminating them. Then I pick up various things : mud, plants (sand if I'm swimming), stones, animal bones, feathers, seeds, flowers, small shells. I glue the newspapers on the pieces of furniture or i make deep cuts on them if I didn't find any newspapers. I now have a surface on which i shall paint. For me, the sand, the plants, the mud ... are the elements of the "Natural Group" of my crop. Using acrylic as a binder, I applied them on the boards and newspapers that are themselves the "Artificial Group". The harvests of the two groups mingled into one entity that attempts to reconcile, postmortem, nature with our lifestyles that destroy it. My approach questions the notion of vanity, sometimes flirts with the attitude of a scientist making a herbarium, to compose a still-life, in the proper sense of the term. "HENJONA is the most personal of my projects. I gave it my name, well, its anagram. Everything in here is about rearranging items that already belong together." - Johanne Landrin.