Richard Pueo - painter - Poigny-la-Forêt

Poigny-la-forêt

All year.

Richard Pueo - painter

It was like some kind of living monster trying to swallow the little human that I was. Thus was born in me this inner conflict between the anguish I felt vis-à-vis this violent nature and the fact of feeling so good among it.

Nature has always been an essential part of my life. My parents having immigrated to France to flee the Franco regime, I grew up in the Paris region on land that once served as a battlefield during the Hundred Years War before turning into a cemetery. So I spent my first ten springs surrounded by buried bones and violence. This particular relationship to death that appeared so early would seem to go against the proper development of a child, yet this old cemetery was for me only a playground, carefree and happy. We lived isolated from reality in a wooden hut, without water or electricity, and only the school constituted a direct link with the rest of the world. I spent most of my time playing in the garden, running in the forest and climbing trees to reach the summit of freedom.

This privileged contact nevertheless offered its share of fears: there were no shutters on the windows, and when night came, the trees began to dance in the wind, their shadows bumped into each other, intertwined on the walls of my room, offering a spectacle that is both captivating and terrifying. It was like some kind of living monster trying to swallow the little human that I was. Thus was born in me this interior conflict between the anguish which I felt vis-à-vis this violent nature and the fact of feeling among it so happy and safe.

Everything changed when my parents decided to live in town. The man and his weaknesses took over my existence, which then was practically devoid of them: we had all the space we wanted, but we found ourselves confined to a house surrounded by a hundred other houses in a city with a gray heart; I was only a child, but I became in the eyes of others nothing but a son of immigrants; I became violent because I had found there the only means of defending myself from the stupidity of men. I became violent towards others, towards animals - accompanied by my father, and therefore towards myself. Finally, love having deserted the common heart of my parents, violence became daily at home, until the day when what was at the time impossible for me to conceive occurred: expatriates, we could not count than on our family, which constituted the hard core essential to our survival; My parents' divorce had the effect of a bomb that blew up the family unit and called into question what I considered to be unshakeable truths. I was lost and I felt the need to leave to try to find answers.

The man had taken me away from nature but it was also thanks to him that I was able to recover my place with her. All these crossed destinies have, in their own way, sharpened my mind and guided my steps towards the life I wanted to have, the man I wanted to become. I understood that like any human being I needed others to help me out, and that even if my childhood was happy thanks to nature, it alone was not enough. “Happiness is only real when shared,” wrote Christopher McCandless in Into the Wild after eating poisonous seeds, surrounded by landscapes as far as the eye could see but with an irremediably lonely heart. The moments when I could have fallen and not got up again are legion, but each stumble was followed by an outstretched hand with benevolence, this benevolence that I try to show today with my loved ones and in my profession, c ie skydiving. One might wonder why I have been practicing this extreme sport for thirty-five years now: am I going to seek death or the violence of the air? Is it a way to rediscover this ambiguous relationship that I have with nature, this eternal need to put myself in danger to feel its presence? Does playing with death with every jump bring me closer to life? These questions can affect anyone who has ever made the decision to jump out of a plane. But for me skydiving was more than a sport, it was a real school of life. My inner anger has come to calm down in contact with the air, each fall acts as an outlet and brings me a little closer to serenity. The competition taught me to surpass myself, the teaching, to support others in their personal development. And on the ground, it's hands clasped, smiles exchanged, it's constant contact with human beings. I was able to see life pass by in its many facets and sometimes metamorphose before me because it is a sport that can make you happy. The solitary child that I was chose a daily life with a thousand encounters, some of which transformed my life and still transform it today. It's an incessant flow of colored energies that brush against each other, intertwine, sometimes merge, sometimes rebound, but which I have always nourished myself with.

I started painting in 2000 after the death of my father, feeling the need to express a pain that I found difficult to put into words. Perhaps I had to sublimate all this violence linked to him since my birth into something artistic, to replace horror with beauty. That said, drawing was my lifelong companion. As a child, I took art lessons; we were each entitled to a delimited space to paint on the wall, but feeling unable not to exceed I ended up taking up all the space to the detriment of my comrades. I needed space and elements to create, I made sculptures with bread crumbs, I broke everything to see what was inside. I knew that staying curious would help me move forward no matter what. It is certainly the pain that pushed me to make paintings, but painting also helps me to calm down in relation to daily tensions and to see the world around me more clearly. Indeed, there are links between man and nature that I wanted to represent by lines reminiscent of the DNA molecule. Nature will always end up regaining the upper hand over man, whose end is inevitable. Despite this, it is appropriate for man to remember this: sadness, violence or the unfortunate vagaries of life must never prevent him from remaining joyful, just as a painting must never cease to shine with its bursts of color. despite the dark reality that it can sometimes bring out.

My painting takes the form of a fight, a fight between nature and man, between life and death, and perhaps even that of my own fight. What is the purpose of man on Earth? Who is the true master, man or nature? Is human decay certain? These questions will remain unanswered for a long time, but I like to think that painting, as well as art in general, brings us ever closer to the truth. I will therefore continue to seek it tirelessly at the end of my brushes.