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Artistic Practice
My work questions the place given to women’s desire and pleasure in images. Through vintage photographs and figures drawn from art history, the octopus becomes a language for speaking about freedom, reclaiming what is one’s own, and emancipation.
Every image begins with an encounter.
When I look at these vintage photographs, I am often struck by the weight of the silence they hold.
For centuries, women were confined to narrow roles.
Their desire, their pleasure and sometimes even their inner freedom were silenced or pushed into the background.
Yet behind the wife, the mother, the muse or the object of desire, I imagine women with dreams, inner worlds and desires of their own.
My work was born of a deep tenderness for these women, and anger at what was denied to them.
By painting over these old images, I seek to reopen a space long taken from them: one in which a woman can fully inhabit her body, her imagination and her desires.
I cannot change their history, but I can offer them another space in which to exist.
Vintage Photographs
What first draws me to a vintage photograph is the emotion it carries and the story it seems to tell.
Every photograph is constructed. The framing, clothing, accessories, setting and pose speak as much about the period as they do about the person portrayed. I like to observe how an image is made and what it seeks to show.
I ask myself what it says about the woman in it: does it serve her, or the gaze of the person looking at her?
Behind these portraits, I sense women whose lives were far larger than the roles of wife, mother, muse or object of desire to which they were so often reduced.
These images become the starting point for an encounter, a silent dialogue from which the painting will emerge.
Beyond the Icon
Today, these questions also extend to the great female figures of art history.
Venus, Maja, Madame X… Their faces, bodies and poses have travelled across the centuries and become part of our collective memory.
But what did they feel behind the images we know? What did Venus desire beyond the desire she inspired? Who was Madame X beyond the elegance, the pose and the scandal?
I like to imagine what lies beyond the icon: what surfaces beneath the beauty, the role and the depiction.
To step through the image and find a woman alive with sensations, fantasies and desires of her own.
My intervention unsettles the familiar image and opens it to another possible history.
Desire is no longer only what the viewer projects onto her: it can become her own.
Why the Octopus?
The octopus appeared in my work before I fully understood what it represented.
At first, it was a gentle, protective presence, accompanying women in search of safety, tenderness and healing. Then, as the work evolved, it changed. It became a language for women’s desire.
In my paintings, the octopus is never a fixed character.
It can be a companion, a lover, a fantasy, desire itself or a protective presence. It responds to each woman’s needs and aspirations.
It can be both the embodiment of her desire and the object of that desire.
When desire is silenced, it does not disappear entirely. It leaves a trace. Just as a fossil preserves the imprint of what once existed, something remains.
The octopus enters that space. At first, it takes part in a process of healing; then it gives body, movement and presence back to what was waiting to come alive again.
Its changing nature allows it to remain ambiguous: sometimes an outside presence, sometimes a fantasy, sometimes almost inseparable from what emanates from the woman.
In this way, it becomes a language capable of giving form to what would otherwise remain invisible.
Why Women’s Desire?
The history of sexuality tells us much about the place given to women, and about the moral codes, religious beliefs and power relations that have shaped bodies and behaviour.
For a long time, women’s pleasure was treated as secondary, suspect or shameful. Their desire was restrained, controlled, sometimes denied, while their bodies were endlessly looked at, depicted and fantasised about.
This contradiction runs through my work.
I am interested in what happens when a woman ceases to be merely the object of desire and becomes the subject of her own pleasure.
I assert women’s right to desire and experience pleasure on their own terms, without having to conform to imposed ideas of femininity, beauty or how they should behave.
In my paintings, desire is neither shameful nor secondary.
It becomes a vital force again: a way of fully inhabiting one’s body, imagination and freedom.
Pleasure opens a space where play, sensuality, fantasy, power and sometimes something sacred can re-emerge.
What has long been made a source of guilt can recover its beauty, strength and legitimacy.
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