Le Temps des Cerises n°3 (2003) Painting by Ovni Delaville

Summer 2001, I'm 18, I just got my baccalaureate, I go on vacation alone. There, a traumatic event, which causes a violent split in my physical and psychological integrity, with a brutal disconnection body/head... And then, in the process, even worse, denial. (Which will last ten years but that's another story). So in 2002, I burn out, I leave everything, I run away without really knowing what I'm running away from and I cut all ties with my network of friends at the time. I find a bread-and-butter job, I look after two adorable little girls who bring me joy and lightness and for a year, I withdraw from all other social contact. I continue to paint, to draw, I try my hand at photography, I go to museums, I listen to Radio Libertaire and then I enroll in a preparatory school for art schools. It was during this year that I managed to express, without being aware of it, a little of the anger, even the rage and the pain that I had inside me. The theme song of Radio Libertaire, Le Temps des Cerises, inspired me with a taste for revolt against the injustice of Lost Paradises and stolen freedoms. The cherished cherries became poppies, the cherished flowers of my parents and my childhood, and took me back to other traumas that I experienced as a child. The red petals became stigmata, wounds, gaping oozing wounds and traces of impacts, tears, anger and despair, an expression of my inner suffering, mine but also that of the Other, in the broad sense, which I absorbed like a sponge and which drips onto the canvas like a dark filter. Just as I did not know how to put words to the facts or define my emotions, I felt an impetuous need to move away from the figurative image with its well-defined contours towards an image of semi-abstraction, liberating and cathartic like the spurt of blood from an edema that has been pierced.

Related themes

Le Temps Des CerisesCeriseCoquelicotsRadio LibertaireLiberté