This time, I went to the exhibition Clair-obscur at La bourse de commerce Pinault. Yes, the guy lucky enough to marry Salma Hayek.

Firstly, I must say that I do love this building. It is a beautiful building in its own right and what they’ve made to transform it into a gigantic art gallery is marvelous. I will never get bored of wandering around inside la bourse de commerce. Sadly, I have got the feeling that this is the main reason why I did not enjoy the last time I’ve been there.

Why did they name this exhibition “Clair-obscur”? I don’t know. I want to believe that this is not a marketing thing, considering the fact that chiaroscuro is very popular (AND BEAUTIFUL). The French term “Clair-obscur” has become even more popular worldwide with the success of the video game called Clair-Obscur: Expedition 33 which has won a Game Award in 2025 for Best Game of the Year.

As I am watching the web page that is supposed to sell me the exhibition, I can notice the chiaroscuro thing in the way we could experience the whole thing. We see a man walking through the different rooms with an effect of fade to black in between each area. That was true. The changing of lighting room after room was so efficient that I had a massive headache afterward. My theory is that the “clair-obscur” experience fully implies the air conditioning settings. It was as hot and cold as a Katy Perry song.

What does the press kit say?

À travers une sélection d’une centaine d’œuvres de la Collection Pinault, et pour la première fois certaines modernes, l’exposition «Clair-obscur» propose un parcours qui traverse l’héritage du chiaroscuro dans les enjeux du temps présent. La Bourse de Commerce se transforme en un paysage à la fois luministe et crépusculaire, invitant le visiteur à une expérience sensible où se confrontent visible et invisible: le clair-obscur y apparaît comme un langage visuel et symbolique renouvelé, un ressort narratif, unprincipe philosophique, qui exprime à la fois la matérialité de la lumière et les zones d’ombre de l’inconscient.

Fine, the important word is “héritage”, meaning “legacy”. I am sorry but not sorry: EVERYTHING in contemporary art could be considered as a legacy of chiaroscuro. Chiaroscuro is huge in history of art. It is something even people who are not that interested in art know. Chiaroscuro is something we don’t have to explain because we litterally can feel it. This is something so simple and so difficult to craft at the same time.

Each piece of art was beautiful by itself. The exhibition was a very nice collection of works of art, of points of view from artists. I won’t question the quality of the work, nor the sincerity with which these artists share their sensibility.

But I still don’t understand why they call this exhibition “clair-obscur”. It felt random. They could have called it “very nice pieces of art by very talented people in an amazing building”. I’d come anyway.

The fact is that I needed a milestone in my life to consider myself as an artist. Creativity is something that I nourish with care. Indeed, I am deeply convinced that it is through our uniquely human capacity to stay creative that we keep our singularity. This is thanks to our creativity, our imagination and our capacity for transgression that we are able to claim ourselves as beings aware of our own existence.

In a conference called “Creativity at the rise of generative content” in BrightonSEO (April 2024), I shared my point of view about AI and its creativity. My claim : our life is our own dataset.

We need no robots.txt to prevent bots from using our mind as a training corpus.

Drawing is a movement of the body in order to mark a medium

I’ve been organizing creative workshops for almost a year : linocut print workshops and intaglio (tetra pak®) printing. And there always are people who are very shy with their pencils. Many times, I have nearly been coaching them to dare to make something with this simple pencil. And this was only the first step! Drawing with graphite is convenient because you can use a rubber to erase and redoing again and again. For my first workshop, the attendees were shocked by the fact that I did not bring any rubber. Actually, as a person who draw mainly with a fountain pen, I tend to forget that erasing is a part of the process of drawing for many people. This is not bragging, this is for me the one true efficient way to improve my technique. The fact is: if I erase a line, I don’t see it anymore… so I easily am drawing exactly the same one afterward.

Many times, people in my workshops are coming for a creative activity. This is not a drawing class or an art workshop. We are here only to have fun and to be proud of what we are crafting. This is not the case for everyone, but this is often : “Everyone in my family is an artist, I am not”; “My sister went to the Beaux-Arts”. It’s like comparison is paralyzing them and this is convincing them that they never will be enough. Actually, as our French President would say: “for sure”, if we compare ourselves to Leonardo da Vinci, we are pretty much stupid and talentless people. How dare you to be unable to draw as fast and as precisely as your cousin who is graduated from l’École supérieure des arts décoratifs de Strasbourg?

An importing fact: during those workshop, I am not here to teach. I am here to help.

Writing is drawing

Handwriting has been becoming a trend with hand lettering, bullet journaling, journaling in general and all those flexible felt-tipped pens that are promising us a marvelous and creative life.

Nevertheless, yes, from my perspective, handwriting is drawing. We all have our own style and our own way to draw letters. Even my doctor has a sense of style, even if it’s unreadable. I am trusting him to have studied medicine with more care than handwriting.

A good drawing is a good design

Again, not an art teacher, only a helper. I like to think drawing as an awareness of light and space. There is this limited space which is the piece of paper. My only goal is that someone can :

1. show an artwork telling “this is a dinosaur”

2. receive the words “yes I see the dinosaur”.

Pretty drawing or not, this is not the main issue.

Pictures, courtesy of Lali Corevetti

As a teenager, I was the kind of kid who would spend a lot of time reading and crafting. As an adult, I have to admit that things haven't changed much. I still read a lot, even if I don’t read the same things. I still make things in many ways. There is a sentence that I like to summarize my profile: I’m not living my dream job, but I’m trying to fill my life with beautiful things.

My friends say that I have many activities, they are right. I feel like I've crafted my own life. This is a patchwork of many things I enjoy. NGL, this is very hard for me. For my mental health. When someone like me has designed a professional life to suit my specific interests, the life I designed to feel perfect can also feel like something I'm forced to endure just to survive. I fully blame capitalism, the nightmare that is forcing me to be productive instead of to be creative.

There are things that are important to me. We are living in a digital age, that can’t be denied. The digital era gave me a job for which I am recognised by my peers. Nevertheless, I still truely enjoy my analog way of life: filling notebooks with nice fountain pens, drawing, using analog cameras, shooting film, and printmaking.

What will you find on this substack account?

Many things. I will share with you my explorations, my thoughts about all those things I find beautiful and interesting. I’ve chosen this platform because of its versatility and the possibility to post different types of media such as texts, pictures and podcasts.

You can consider this as the spiritual successor to my blog Ecribouille.net.

Because of capitalism, I've enabled paid subscriptions but I’ve kept it at the lowest pricing that Substack allows. I promise to be generous in creating free content. All revenue generated from subscriptions will be directly reinvested in Euphonie Studio, the editorial experimentation lab run by my agency, Assonance Agency.

The original square hole video : https://youtu.be/cUbIkNUFs-4?si=xEZ_viKxRBraffzH

Le log, donc, un journal audio. Je vous préviens, ça n'aura ni queue ni tête.