‘My art came from a personal interest, since I didn’t grow up in an artistic family. My father is a consultant, my mother teaches architecture, and my brothers are all in finance. However, my mother frequently took me to see exhibitions in Paris, my home city. I vividly remember my first artistic revelation: a retrospective of Pierre Alechinsky at the Jeu de Paume. I was five years old. In the show, there was a documentary which showed Alechinsky in his studio. He had installed a large beam to position himself above the canvas he was working on. Looking back, I realize everything was already there: action painting and very large formats.

‘My first love was dance – an all-consuming passion. From age ten, I trained at the ballet school of the Opéra National de Paris. Ten years ago, I had to stop due to an injury. This was an abrupt turnaround and so at the age of 20, I threw myself into painting. Until then, art had only been a hobby of mine. As a teenager, I used to draw all the time, but my approach remained very technical. I would do portraits to practice, asking my family or classmates to pose for me. Truth be told, they were quite bad!

‘When I started my current practice, I knew very little about the history of painting. The process was very personal, and during the first years, I found inspiration in the memories and sensations I had kept from dancing. As time went by, I started to educate myself. I realized I was part of a larger art movement: Abstract Expressionism. I feel close to artists like Olivier Debré and Hans Hartung, figures from the 1970s and 1980s who also poured paint to translate movement. I’ve turned to oils in the last two or three years. Accordingly, I have also been paying closer attention to painters using that technique, such as the Chinese-French artists Zao Wou-Ki and Chu Teh-Chun.

‘My debut exhibition happened only two years after I made my first paintings. In 2015 I was included in a group show at Galerie Hors-Champs in Paris. The gallery showed my work again, this time with solo presentations in 2016 and 2017. Those three exhibitions really helped me get a foot on the ladder. Last spring, in March 2023, I had my first solo museum show at Musée Unterlinden in Colmar, France, which felt like a significant achievement as well.

‘I work on a very large and, at times, monumental scale. This was the case for my show at the Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpêtrière in Paris in 2021, where I suspended the paintings in a circular installation. People had to raise their heads and look up towards the sky, which became particularly symbolic in such a setting. As a dancer, you learn about stage presence. For me, being conscious of one’s body when looking at an artwork is just as important.

‘I am lucky to have a big studio in Vitry-sur-Seine, a former industrial suburb southeast of Paris. My workday starts on my laptop: I read the news and reflect upon exhibition projects. This is also the time I set aside for studio visits. In the afternoon, I start to paint – I do so every afternoon and I make no exceptions, whether something comes out of it or not. Towards the end of the day, I try to visit exhibitions or see a play. MAC VAL– Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne is close by, so I go there regularly.

‘My installation for the NetJets Lounge at Art Basel 2024 is titled ‘Inner Horizons’. I’ll show 13 new paintings, with two of them positioned outside the lounge. The collaboration with NetJets echoes my love for travel and, in particular, hiking. I frequently take long, solitary trips to isolated locations, such as Tasmania’s mountains last February. Painting and walking in nature bear many similarities: they open up paths to the unknown. Studio Artera, my art agency, were instrumental to this project by facilitating the dialogue with NetJets.

‘I am already preparing my next big show, which will open in October at the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle in Paris. It will be the first painting exhibition set in the Grande Galerie de l’Évolution as a part of a more expansive program around the desert. It might be a lesser-known fact about me, but I also hold a master’s degree in biology and geology. This project is crucial for me as I also want to expand the idea of movement to encompass landscape: how natural forms emerge and evolve and how to transcribe them onto the canvas.