I started working on Orly Airport's Southern Wing in 2003.
Between 1995 and that date, all of my painting had almost exclusively been inspired by Oscar Niemeyer’s masterpiece, the city of Brasilia.
Due to the timing proximity between this corpus of work dedicated to Brasilia and my first explorations of Orly South’s architecture, I thus indulged my first groping on the subject awkwardly, and in a certain confusion of concepts, intention and form. This was inevitable. The symbolism emanating from Brasilia was too powerful, and architect Henri Vicariot’s building had a hard time finding its identity in my research, confronted with the Brasilia masterpieces of the Three Powers Plaza.
At the time, my work on Brasilia was centered around a parallel between the built architecture and the human architecture, the building's shapes marrying those of the human body or opposing them, according to the theme of concerned painting. I mechanically reproduced my "Brazilian" approach to the Orly volumes designed by Henri Vicariot. Two canvases were born in 2003 from this confusion.
The first was entitled "Orly (Sud). En attendant de voir la suite" ("Orly South. Waiting To See What Will Follow") -a premonitory title, if ever there was one. The second one was called "Orly (Sud). Dominique Francon attend Howard Roark" ("Dominique Francon is waiting for Howard Roark", a fusional fiction between Orly and "The Foutainhead", American writer and philosopher Ayn Rand's masterpiece, which later gave life to King Vidor’s flamboyant eponymous movie.
Both paintings featured nude characters. But I had trouble grasping their meaning : the cohabitation of naked characters with others who were not, certainly brought up a form of questioning and reverie, but the plastic of the naked characters did not evoke the place where they wandered. So the exercise stopped there.