My first encounter with painting occurred some years ago. I was about six or seven, eating breakfast at my parents’ place, a bowl of hot chocolate in front of me (the most important part of the day for a morning girl like me). In the kitchen was a portrait of my father, painted by a cousin, Alain Signoles. Every day, while looking at this painting, I would play at spotting mistakes: I had to find (and I found!) one new mistake each day.

Alain’s paintings are powerful, shaped by fauvism and German expressionism: my father’s hair is bottle green, his skin titanium white (the morning-after complexion), his elbow pointed, his eyes wonky with a slight squint (the eye of a man still thinking of his studies). The poorly coloured-in backdrop is exotic blue, the nose green (red would have been more logical). I did not understand the attraction and enchantment of such an odd portrait. But I knew that I won my game every day!

A few years of oxidation, infusion and decantation later, I understood that it is these very mistakes that make the painting interesting. And the same goes for people. Our slipups and shortcomings give us room, give us life, allow us to risk getting things wrong and being ourselves. I have had a taste for beat-up things ever since (to the extent that I often prefer the dead to the living).

Alain is overly sensitive, overly whole, overly shy, overly ambitious, overly everything. My father has always told me that as a young man he was just the opposite but that when he got into painting he became very peculiar. He stopped painting 25 years ago. He couldn’t take it anymore. He never managed to tame the beast. Nowadays he’s doing fine; he lives a somewhat isolated life with his girlfriend in Bages, near Narbonne, engrossed in books and poetry.

Thank you.

I’m reminded of a line by the poet Vladimir Holan (that I’m pinching from Nicolas Bouvier): ‘there is destiny and what does not tremble in it is not solid’.

I was going to stop my little speech there, but a friend tells me: you can’t stop now! what about yourself?! give us some clues, for fuck’s sake!!! Ok, Benoît… Let’s begin with music and more particularly with the music I’ve fed on since childhood: Vinicius de Moraes (and his gang). This man, his voice and his laughter have always calmed, instructed and transported me (not that I’ve understood a word in forty years… Worrying, right?). There’s not been a single day or a single painting without music: music inspires, binds, concludes. It gives me just the distance I need.

After music come photographs: the photos of Charles Camberoque, or Benoît to his friends, a lifelong friend of mine. As a child I was frightened by them, especially the black and white ones of Cournonterral (with a girl trapped between two men, her mouth full of wine dregs). Benoît does not have a desperate desire to please (how beautiful!). His photos are special, human-sized, without posing, without display. They form my décor.

I can’t quote all the authors to whom I owe so much, though I will at least quote Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet: ‘Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write.’ And then the films of Fellini for their unequalled sense of beauty, and of Bunuel (perhaps they are the greatest) for his intelligence and freedom, at every level, and, finally, Godard, for his humour and tartness.

Painting truly is the oldest profession in the world. So let’s speak about the living – of Chéri Samba, of his spirit, of the freshness he has brought from Africa, of his sincerity and his taste for the real and for people. This is a man that ‘me donne l’envie d’avoir envie’ – makes me ‘desire to desire’ – (thank you, Johnny).

I never could work with anything but oil. Oil opens up over time; it requires patience and an insane energy. In this fight without rules, void of gravity, chance plays an important role. The layers enter into dialogue in their own good time. It is when they feel me weakening that they begin to pulse! We three, the oil, time and I, breathe in synchrony.

” Time is the substance of which I am made. Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.” Jorge Luis Borges