After having hunted wherever he could (including online) for old representations (whatever their nature) of buildings, cathedrals, monuments, he retouched them and enhanced them with the flames and the plume of smoke that took hold of them, one day, one night, but well after the time of the original image. Thus, this painting, in which a steamboat sails along the Seine towards Notre-Dame de Paris under a yellowish morning sky, is enhanced by the fires of the fire that ravaged the cathedral one late afternoon in 2019. Here we have the combination, in the same space, the same frame, of two temporalities and two plastic aims that everything separates. One (the first) intended to capture the monument in all its splendour, while the rectified version shows it in the unpredictable, intense, incandescent moment of its destruction. The whole series thus moves in the arcane of time, between the past of a monument and its worst future, which, however unpredictable it was, did not fail to happen.

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