Indians (2016-2017)

" Richard, you are an artist. That’s the reason why we get along so well. Artists are the white world Indians. They seem to be dreamers, people who live in clouds and get no sense of reality. That is exactly what they say about Indians. I tell you : our world is the true one, not the world of the green frog. This one is a nasty nightmare, the evil of the city uniformity ". Tahca Ushte, 1989

I always have been fascinated by natives and so-called « primitive » civilizations and I remember very deeply my visit to Navajo land in the Monument Valley (Arizona & Utah, USA) in 2002. For this Indian series of drawings and paintings, I also have been inspired by the amazing exhibition « Indians of the plains » organized in 2014 by the Museum Quai Branly in Paris and the complete portfolio of Edward Sheriff Curtis photographs.
I do respect North American Indians for their connected relationship to nature, their permanent homage to the mother earth, their huge generosity and their dignity, their denial for material world, their lack of instinct of property.

These people have a natural and very intuitive intelligence of life, far from learned books. They naturally use their dreams and visions as predictions. In their culture, the shaman is the chosen one because he is the best specialist of the human soul for his community. He is the man « condemned to inspiration because of his extraordinary sensory perception and his ability to see above the visible world » (Mircea Eliade). And because of that, the shaman has exactly the same mission as an artist. That is why many creators (Chateaubriand, Antonin Dvorak, Frida Kahlo, Max Ernst, Victor Brauner) have been and keep on being fascinated through centuries by these cultures.
I wish this work could be my homage to their lost paradise. I wish I could share a focus of their traditions. I have a dream for a much fairer, reasonable and generous world.