My painting is as much linked to an irrepressible taste for assembly and collection as to the attraction of the distant: picking, capturing pieces of moments in small notebooks, on free sheets, letting it ferment until the imagination springs into the magic of unconscious assemblies.

How many distant lands, ancient cities, sanctuaries or ports must we have crossed, how many faces, processions and fetishes must we have met, incense breathed in before all this crystallizes into unsuspected arrangements?

Faced with the aesthetics of the stripping down, I choose to depict the density, the fullness, the spasms of the crowds, the long transhumance of the polychrome peoples, the great circus of life with its share of farces and its round track in the centre of which parades an immense pachyderm in precarious balance.

The painting, full of vital breaths, offers in short an intoxicating challenge: to represent a thought in action, to paint a multiple world in panoramic vision, to give the illusion of embracing the great whole.

 Painting reveals the other side of reality, this long desired elsewhere, it reveals the vital need to "travel" as one would do in a country, to travel within oneself. 

Christophe Ronel