How can a color evoke memories? By replacing Marcel Proust’s madeleine with a color, I revive my childhood memories. A deep blue from which objects charged with meaning emerge, together telling the story of a young boy in the French countryside of the 1980s.

Blue Series is a personal project composed of monochromatic digital drawings and short texts. When I begin a new project, I always search first for a story to tell. Words help me find a singular direction, a new territory to explore. Starting with words pushes me out of my graphic habits.
It is an opportunity for visual exploration that enriches my personal palette and gives the project a sense of adventure, of which I become the first spectator. I am constantly searching for the joy of discovering something new.
In my work, I want to be sincere about what I share. And while the starting points are often personal, they must also resonate with the viewer. Throughout the process, I keep in mind how the work will be perceived and what it might evoke in those who see it. For Blue Series, which is the most intimate work i had James Joyce’s quote in mind “In the particular is contained the universal”.

Inner color — How did I find this color? When I was searching for it, the idea was to find a monochroma- tic tone capable of evoking the sensation of something resurfacing from memory. Blue was obvious to me. If you have ever been to the south of France, you know that the sky there is like a vast blue ceiling, even in winter. Blue was also, in the 1980s, the color assigned to boys — a symbolic tool of gender. But which blue?

Color of memories — I grew up in the countryside of the south of France. My father was a winemaker. We all lived together — my grandparents, my uncle’s family, and ours — on the property, surrounded by vineyards, flowers, and pine trees, under a solid azure sky. Summers were already very hot back then. People kept the shutters closed during the day, waiting for evening to enjoy the outdoors, when the air turns violet between day and night. This evening sky is my blue — a “purplish blue”, which will soon intensify into midnight blue — the color of irises, grapes, lilacs... a velvety blue.

Erotic color — From this color, many objects tied to memory surfaced, like a romantic Cluedo: an iris flower; a pair of magpies with blue highlights; blue veins beneath pale skin; a starry sky... I remembered the scent of Guerlain’s Mitsouko in my mother’s blue bedroom; the fluttering curtain in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet; my grandmother gardening among the lilacs; my father’s hands stained with grapes during
the harvest; the statue of the Virgin Mary in her blue plaster dress; the bright blue shorts of a vineyard worker... All these images told me who I was. They were the clues to my future self in fragments.