Painting rocks

In 2018, the artist Marco Grassi, who partly grew up in the same village as me in Bretagne, made me discover a source of yellow clay in the cliff near a beach from our childhood.

We collected the clay and improvised a four hands fresco on the black rocks of Saint-Jean du Doigt, before watching it vanish, erased by the tide.

This practice has since become a ritual each time I visit Bretagne.Painting on rock becomes a meditative gesture that connects me to the elements. I wander the landscape in search of an ideal site, collect clay, paint. The light turns this clay into gold before the sea takes it away.
I favour primitive symbols which seem to belong to an archaic cosmology, underlining  geological strata and reviving fossils.

The strokes of paint bring back a distant past, expose it to the present time until the erasure which marks the beginning of a new cycle.