Dreams
Series of computer generated images and video sequences.
Variable dimensions and duration.

To hold a "book of dreams" is quite an usual practice. Most of the time, it is the work of an amateur, because the "book of dreams", just as the diary, its corollary, is not meant to be an artwork. The goal of its writer is to answer an intellectual curiosity or a need for introspection. Amongst the most famous "books of dreams", one can mention Franz Kafka or Ferderico Fellini's ones. The first one is only textual while the other one is copiously illustrated, but both were private writings.

Since my work often deals with mental images (memories, mental visualizations or daydreaming) it is not surprising that I developped an interest in dreams and that I decided to start my own "book of dreams". But instead of writing, I decided to use video and computer generated images as my preferred tools in order to retain the memory of my night time visions.

Choosing this visual approach, I had to be careful to distance myself from surrealism whose propensity to focus on the extravagant and the bizarre is far from my own concerns. For me, there is no need of chimaeras to make a dream valuable. On the contrary I consider it far more interesting and surprising when the images it displays are purely realistic. What is truly extraordinary about dreams is the fact that anybody, when falling aspleep, becomes an artist, an inventor, a demiurge that can create with no effort profusion of landscapes, cities, objects, animals that have all the appearance of reality.

So I try to be as meticulous and precise as I can. Exploring the territories of dreams, I identify with the 18th and 19th centuries scientists who travelled to the New World and tried to record through drawing the form of every single plant, rock or animal. Just like them, I don't discriminate between the objects I encounter but pay them all the same attention, trying to faithfully depict the things I witnessed. To do so, I use a 3D software in order to patiently recreate my oniric visions and to produce images that try to reflect not only the shape of every individual object but also the general atmosphere of the dream.

Of course my approach is highly paradoxical. Can I really pretend to a scientific outlook or to an objective point of view when it comes to my own dreams ? As Jorge Luis Borges pointed out, dream is a great mystery in which our soul is the theatre, the actors and the audience at the same time. Thus that's myself, a dark, hidden yet deeply intimate part of myself, that once elaborated the visions I then slavishly try to reproduce. In the world of dreams, I indeed is another.

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