"A Matter of Balance"

Africa is not short of grand stories or dramas — the big cats, the migrations, the endless ballet of predators and prey. But there are also small stories, carried by protagonists one does not always notice. With this painting, I wanted to set aside the great African stage and focus on an encounter between two minute actors.

On one side, a dung beetle pushing its fortune backwards — one of the rare animals known to navigate by the Milky Way. On the other, a leopard tortoise advancing in a straight line, without stopping, unaware of the dangers around it. Unaware, too, of the presence of this small beetle. It takes its name from the spots on its shell that evoke the rosettes of the great cat — each groove tells a year spent on this earth, and some live more than a century. They are heading in opposite directions. And a tiny pebble, in the wrong place, could trap them both in a face-to-face whose outcome is unknown.

To tell this story, I chose to get down to their level — as though one were lying on one's belly in the bush dust, or suddenly shrunk to their scale. This viewpoint creates an unexpected intimacy: the tortoise and the dung beetle become the only inhabitants of this world, and their encounter, the central event.

Each carries its burden — the tortoise, its shell; the beetle, its ball. Two parallel equilibria, two worlds that should never have crossed, united by the chance of a path and the threat of a pebble. We do not know what is going to happen. And perhaps that is 'une question d'équilibre' — this suspension between two destinies that ignore and brush past each other.