A room holds things. Not metaphorically, literally. You walk back into a space, and something could be waiting for you there, something you didn’t know you’d left. That’s what interests me. The wall that remembers better than you do. The unfinished room that keeps the thought exactly as you abandoned it. The moment before you enter a room, you already know something about what’s inside: a mood, a temperature. Buildings, for me, are allegories of memory.

As a child, I used to open the Bible at night specifically to read Jonah, just to frighten myself a little. There’s something in that story: the darkness, the enclosure, the strange peace of being swallowed. Pinocchio had the same thing. Different surface, same interior. I didn’t connect them consciously. They were already connected. A whale is a building, and its abdomen, a room. A place of withdrawal that carries you somewhere without asking your permission. That’s close to how dreams work.

When curator and friend Pierre Alexandre Mateos invited François Durel and me to work on this exhibition together, we decided to approach those subjects through satire. Catholic upbringing, family discipline, class codes, and domestic rituals are already theatrical in many ways; exaggeration felt like an appropriate way to engage with them. But as we developed the exhibition, I became increasingly aware that satire alone was not enough. Beneath the humour and caricature were experiences that remained emotionally charged and physically present. What stayed with me was not the possibility of mocking those structures, but the way they continue to inhabit the body long after they have been rejected. The exhibition reinforced my belief that autobiography becomes most compelling when it allows contradictory feelings to coexist rather than resolving them into a single position.

The first table painting I did was for Les leçons particulières (Why did I scream (so loud?)), and afterward I just needed to paint more tables. I also love good food. I’m a bon vivant, and I truly enjoy sharing long meals and good conversation around a table with friends. Also, there is something strangely animate about tables; their ambiguous function and almost animal morphology give them a peculiar character. Maybe tables are pets, just like chairs.

I like to question the idea of beauty, but I don’t really deal with disgust intentionally. Disgust hums at a frequency just below what you’d call beautiful. You tune the painting until you find the right point and make sure the light is wrong. Sometimes you go too far. That’s fine too.

I use collage a lot as a starting point for paintings, but it often escapes me and remains as it is, without becoming a painting. Sometimes I collect images from magazines, newspapers, or the internet and leave them in a drawer for months or years. Then, whenever I get stuck on a figure in a painting, I pull one out and use it as a model to move forward.

The question assumes I know how much story is in there. I’m not sure I do. I know what I put in, what accumulates around it, the imaginary potential, the viewer’s own material; that’s not mine to control.

I listen to music nonstop in the studio. William’s work has been there for a long time, since my early twenties. When Unentitled came into the room, it felt completely natural, the sound was already part of how I was thinking about space. There’s a primary school exercise I still think about: a teacher would play Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and ask us to draw what we heard. No instructions beyond that. It’s the most honest description I have of what sound does to an image.

Sound is also a shortcut to images. It can trigger visual memories, bringing back places, faces, atmospheres, or colours. Painting from music feels a bit like composing a movie scene.

Opera houses and cinemas are remarkable precisely because of what surrounds the emptiness. All that ornamentation built to frame a stage, a space that only becomes itself when something is happening inside it. Paint it and you create a strange doubling: a painting watching a space that is waiting to be watched. For me, nothing is more haunted than the theatre scenes of Eugène Carrière or Félix Vallotton, where one can almost hear the orchestra warming up in the pit.

Two works come to mind. Those Secret Songs (Study for a Room) taught me a lot about using space and allowing light to breathe within the canvas, intensifying the chiaroscuro effect. Then Prima Scena, currently shown at the MOCO Museum in Montpellier in the show "Under the Skin," curated by Anya Harrison, which is the first sculpture I made using found objects, sound, and light. One of the most interesting aspects of the process has been including open collaborations with other artists like Low Lov on the soundscape. Definitely not the last one.

Lately, apart from Basinski, I've been stuck on Beautiful Dreamer by Roy Orbison and a few ambient and shoegaze albums. The rest is radio: classical music, jazz, the news bulletin, and podcasts about topics I have no practical use for.

I’ve been interested in the renewed attention being paid to materiality and physical processes. In an environment saturated with images, there seems to be a growing appreciation for works that insist on being objects. I like the idea that an artwork can still be stubbornly physical, heavy, porous, and difficult to compress into a JPEG. The bar may be low, but it’s nice to see matter making a comeback, I guess.