“Les Baigneuses” is a typical painter’s motif. It implies the artist beholds the scene from his favorite standpoint: the voyeur’s. I believe this explains the large number of paintings with that theme since the Renaissance period: Diane Bathing, Suzanne and the old people, the Baigneuse ( Titian, Tintoretto, Corrège).

The European conception of the painting seen as a window open onto the world gives both the viewer and the artist a unique perspective, as they both have the privilege of seeing without being seen by the bathing ladies. This them also allows me to wander in the history of painting and among its multiple subjects. When I started this series, I had Paul Gauguin and Henri Matisse’s works in mind: I wanted it to make me feel immersed again in my travels and in the realm of color. I also want the landscape to play a major part again and naturally the New Zealand landscapes were the ones to come up front. This series represents a new step in my work: everything pleasantly intermingles: topic and style, color and shape. I have fun confronting various periods in the history of art: a bather by Paul Cézanne can be seen wandering in a Dutch still life by Wilhelm Kalf and then Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’s ” Grande =odalisques” is the side with Gustave Courbet’s ” Two Friends” on the banks of lake Tekapo in New Zealand.