Why forests — a new page to tell the story behind the work

For the past few days there has been a new page on this site: The Nature series — the forest, a living system. It tells not what I paint or sculpt — other pages do that — but why I have made the forest the central subject of my work for some years now. A short text, anchored in three books and one hypothesis. Here is what it contains, and why I wanted it to exist.

What Suzanne Simard demonstrated

A few years ago, a Canadian biologist named Suzanne Simard demonstrated, through years of field experiments, what foresters had long suspected without daring to say it: the trees of a forest communicate with one another. They exchange resources. They warn one another of danger. They feed, as a priority, the young shoots around them.

And all of this passes through a network the eye cannot see — a network of fungal filaments called mycorrhizae, which connect the roots beneath the surface of the soil.

What appears at human height as a competition for light — each tree pulling towards the sky, straining towards the available space — turns out, at root height, to be a gift economy. The largest trees, what Simard calls mother trees, redistribute water and carbon to the weaker, the younger, those that would not otherwise hold on.

I read Simard in 2022. What I read, I was already painting.

The crowd, the forest — the same weave

For more than twenty years I have been observing and painting crowds. Seen from above, generally. Landscapes crossed by silhouettes that walk, gather, disperse. What I was looking for in those compositions was not the individuals. It was the weave. What connects them without their necessarily noticing it. What makes a crowd alive when each of the people in it often feels alone.

When I began to paint forests, a few years ago, I did not feel I was changing subject. I felt I was continuing.

The trees that appear in my recent canvases — Flamboyant, Un jour d’été, L’heure pourpre — never stand alone. They are close together, intertwined, leaning against others. The palette moves away from the expected green: it turns blue, turquoise, pink and red-brown — not to decorate, but because what interests me is not what the forest looks like, it is what it does. What it makes you feel. What it makes you understand.

In the recent canvases, the crowds seen from above have become stands of trees. Each trunk is unique. None stands alone.

Kropotkin, Kimmerer — two books that accompany the work

Beneath this reflection lie two other books that have accompanied the studio for a long time.

Peter Kropotkin, who wrote in 1902, in Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, that cooperation, as much as competition, was a driver of survival. A counter-reading of poorly digested Darwinism, which recalled — more than a century ahead of time — what genetics and ecology would later confirm. Kropotkin observed ant hills, hives, flocks of birds. From them he drew a simple proposition: where mutual aid unfolds, the species survives.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, botanist and member of the Potawatomi Nation, who takes mycorrhizae as the model for a gift economy applicable to human communities. Her sentence, in Braiding Sweetgrass:

All flourishing is mutual.

To hear it properly, one must remember that Kimmerer is a scientist. What she offers is not a fine idea. It is a verified fact — extended by analogy to what that fact might tell us about ourselves.

A working hypothesis, and a way of making it visible

I did not come out of twenty years in the studio with a manifesto. I came out with a working hypothesis.

The hypothesis: our societies work on the same principle as Simard’s forest. Beneath the visible surface of the individual — beneath what our social networks, our CVs, our annual appraisals make legible — there is a mesh of solidarities that connects and supports us. Extended families. Long friendships. Professional collectives. Shared territories. As discreet as the mycorrhizal network.

When that mesh tears, the individual falters — even when they believe they depend on no one but themselves. When it holds, it makes growth, risk-taking and resilience possible.

This is not idealism. It is what forest ecology has been showing for thirty years, and what sociology and anthropology have been recounting for a century.

In the studio, I try to make that palpable — without saying it. To paint in order to show, not to prove.

From burnt forests to white porcelain — sculpture carries it on

For the past year, the painting has continued into sculpture. Black stoneware. Porcelain.

Renouveau (stoneware and porcelain, 2025) — charred trunks from which mosses and white buds emerge. The violence of the fire, and already something else coming.
La forêt originelle (porcelain, 2025) — a white canopy unfolded in porcelain, a fragile and luminous structure, like a dream of origins.
Cocon de forêt I (black stoneware, 2026) — burnt matter from which something else is already escaping. Black as a double memory: that of the fire, and that of the cocoon where something is preparing to be reborn.

Black stoneware evokes scorched earth, white porcelain the fragility of what grows back. Making the two coexist in the same work is a way of holding together two truths our age finds hard to think at the same time: the violence of upheaval, and the gentleness of life beginning again.

Sculpture continues what painting had begun.

What is on the page

On The Nature series — the forest, a living system, you will find:

An introduction to the approach: what led me to forests, what I try to make visible in the palette and the composition
A scientific and ethical development on mycorrhizae, mother trees, and why this resonates with our ways of living in society — with references to Simard, Kropotkin and Kimmerer
A section on sculpture — porcelain and stoneware, burnt forests and renewal
The inspirations running through this research
Links to the works and to the current exhibition

It is a text I wanted short, dense and honest. It draws a line between what is a hypothesis (mine) and what is a verified fact (that of the researchers cited).

A chance to see this work for real — Viroflay, 15 October

This reflection takes very concrete form in a few weeks’ time.

On Thursday 15 October 2026 at 7pm, the Galerie À l’Écu de France in Viroflay opens the group exhibition Forêts, in which I am fortunate to take part alongside six other artists — Isabel Bisson Mauduit, Michèle Caranove, Pascal Cuart, Fabien Jouanneau, Audrey Keller and Dominique Moreau. The exhibition runs until 6 December.

All the practical information and an introduction to my fellow artists are in the article devoted to the Viroflay exhibition. A rich cultural programme accompanies the exhibition — the documentary film Il était une forêt by Luc Jacquet on 7 November, a lecture series in November–December, and a pop-up creative workshop on 9 December.

If you want to read about the approach before coming to see the works — or afterwards — the page Why forests is there for that.