American by birth and heart, everything since my birth: segregation, the black ghetto of South Chicago where I lived, the movement of the "Black Panthers" strongly established in my neighborhood, the confinement of my career exclusively to the black milieu and until to the family memory that stopped at my great-grandmother, a slave in the southern United States, reminded me of my status as an African-American and the ignorance of my Roots.
Since then, my work has been unconsciously dictated by a search for blackness and faces, in a way my signature: big lips, frizzy hair, imaginary references to tribal scenes, faces hidden in bodies - both in painting and in sculpture or in photos, research on light and the rendering of matter in the dark. For years I worked in isolation, in my eyes it was just a hobby (to which I devoted 12 to 20 hours a day) without any commercial intentions, an outlet that blocked any other possibility of artistic creation (dance, comedy , makeup) ... Each work is born from an irrepressible need to express what I have in me. It is a totally personal expression that makes fun of artistic currents, mercantile fashions and physiological needs (sleeping, eating…), a kind of trance, of liberating possession.
