It is with our minds and hands that we have transformed the world into what it is today. It is also through our minds and hands that we can transform it into something else. Although at first glance our hands seem very small today in a world increasingly dominated by machines and screens, they remain our primary means of acting on the material world and the vehicle for extraordinarily rich sensory interactions with it.

Wood carving allows me to establish a sensitive connection with a material that retains a deep trace of the life that once animated it, and to transform it in accordance with my own worldview. Since ancient Greece, Western civilisation has conceived of technical or artistic creation as the imposition, by a human agent, of a project devised by their mind on inert matter that can be shaped at will. But what we usually call ‘matter’ is not inert at all; as physics shows, it is in fact only a moment in the general movement of the universe. This is clearly the case with dead wood, which until recently was a living organism with its own history.

I decided to take this reality seriously and to view artistic activity as a way for me to participate in the ongoing metamorphosis of living nature. As a result, I do not do ‘classical’ wood carving. Admittedly, I sometimes carve a block of wood with a preconceived project in mind to test my technical skills, but the vast majority of my sculptures are the product of a very different process: I pick up a piece of dead wood in nature that arouses my curiosity, I begin to clean and carve it, and in doing so, I let myself be carried away by the story it tells me, reincarnating it into a character or object that respects its shape and texture. Although I am the one who creates the sculpture, I am not the one who arbitrarily decides what it will be. In a way, I am the agent of the metamorphosis of a once-living being that begins a new life as a sculpture.

It goes without saying that this approach to artistic creation in general, and wood carving in particular, does not allow for the reproduction of works, each of which is unique. However, wood offers only a finite number of shapes and structures, each of which tends to produce a certain type of sculpture. I have therefore sought to classify my sculptures into a few broad themes to facilitate their presentation on this website, although, to be honest, this classification is rather arbitrary.