1970s Formative Years

Formative Years

1970s

In 1976, after studying architecture for three years, I came to the conclusion that images were my true calling. Buildings and architecture fascinated me for sure, but not the nitty-gritty of construction. In June, after a year spent drawing and painting using an intricate pen and ink technique, I passed the examination to enter a school of photography recently opened in Marseille.

While waiting for the beginning of the school year in September, I spent the summer exploring the relation between the traditional graphic mediums I had been using and the photographic medium I had recently grown fond of. Taking photographs was of course interesting, but what fascinated me most was the medium itself. I couldn't help but wonder about the effect of photography on the perception of time and space, and the resulting paradox that took the form of a photograph. The transition between these two phases of my life took on the form of a drawing, where I was purposely exploring the relation between graphic and photographic mediums.

Imaginativité

Drawings

Photo School

Marma

1970s - Centre Culturel Péchiney Gardanne
Studies with Jean Paul Angenard in a local cultural centre

l'enfant sauvage

This painting was based on a cover of the magazine Rock and Folk. It featured Michael Shrieve, the amazing 16 years drummer of the legendary band Santana. The shot was taken during their gig at the Woodstock festival.

Gouache on paper, 1970

Imaginativité, 1973

Exhibition Invite

Exhibited Drawings

Drawings, 1976-77

Turning point of artistic practice
Summer 1977

Time Frame
65x50cm - mixed media on paper - 1977

The beginning of a journey of exploration into the overlapping of
time-space in painting, photography, and performance

The photo school years, 1978-79

The two years of study in the brand new photographic school housed by the University of Marseille Provence were filled with a lot of field work practice and long hours spent in the black and white dark room. But my inclination for pictorial manipulation soon made me use colour hand-tinting, the technic that became the medium of my first exhibition in Singapore a few years later.

School projects

studio works

graphic works

The portfolios

Study of visible phenomenon with infrared wavelength applications, Physical science portfolio, 1979

Genoa, 1978

Hand-tinting experiments

Marma, throughout the 1970s

In collaboration with Jean-Jacques Martin

Le Donjon - 169 Rue Sainte, Marseille

The dungeon... the medieval architecture of the nearby abbey of St Victor made me and my friends give this name to the flat I occupied for four years during my university days in Marseille. It overlooked the Vieux Port, and out of the two 18th century majestic bay windows, my day to day scenery was made up of blue skies, forever changing hues over the Mediterranean, and the coming and going of passenger ships servicing the maritime routes to Corsica and Algeria. I lived right at the heart of the oldest point of contact between northern Europe and the warmth of faraway lands, lying over there, to the east and south of the waving horizon. I lived right at the doorstep of Massilia, the Greek port with a history of over 2000 years.

The flat was spacious and lend it self to good partying. It became a meeting point for a group of friends of a like-mind, all with various aspirations at being creative in some way or another. All was well, but by the start of 1980, I suddenly decided to join Xavier Gaermynck in Asia, a university friend who had left two years earlier to travel in Thailand, and ended up setting-up an advertising company in Singapore. As I was readying my self to leave the familiarity of 'home', my flat became a space in transition, open to the flux of exchanges between worlds that had built Massilia in the past, made it prosperous in the 19th century, and soon would take me away for a new life in a strange land. For a year, the Donjon became a space for experimentations and expressions of all sorts, open to all, that answered to no rules other than embracing one's own full artistic responsibility for whatever would be produced, performed, and shared there.

Two things had been with me since my childhood that somehow pointed in the direction of a future life in Asia. The first one was a postcard from Japan showing three ladies playing with a herd of deers in Nara. It was given to me by my uncle and godfather, a pilot with the airforce who had the amazing luck to travel to Japan in the early 1960s. The image was brightly coloured yet peaceful and harmonious. I can't say that I found it 'fascinating'. It didn't triggered any sense of urge to travel there in me. I just liked it for its tranquillity, the foggy horizon, the gentleness of the ladies, and their long shadows on ground.

The other one was in a way even more subliminal. It was a shell, the seashell of a creature indigenous to tropical waters. My great-grandfather, who had served the French colonial regime in Indochina in the 1910s, had brought it back from Tonkin as a souvenir for my great-grandmother. She had kept it preciously since then, one the many objects from another time that turned her house into a playground of wild explorations during the my holidays there. They all fascinated me in one way or the other, but that shell was truly from another world. It came from "tonkin" and the word Tonkin had a music to it that spontaneously translated into images and connotations... It could even be sang to the tune of a lively song from that period... ma tonquiqui, ma tonquiqui, ma tonquinoiiiiiiise... And then, there was that other song which my grand father loved to sing at the end of family dinner. It took the imagination even further away, to China, a land of ecstatic sensuality according to the lyrics of the song... nuit de Chine, nuit câline, nuit d'amour, nuit d'ivresse, de tendresse...

These two things were certainly pleasant and meaningful memories from my childhood. But they were not specifically important and I didn't associate them to wild fantasies or longing for an exotic land. I was a happy and contended Provence boy. Yet, sometime around the 18 January 1981, I boarded a Caravelle in Marseille airport, first onto London, and from there onto Singapore. The 747 in Heathrow was particularly massive and impressive. Things were on a different scale. A new life had begun. And both postcard and shell eventually found their place in my Singaporean home.