"Emerald of Bengal"

I have always associated the tiger with fire. Perhaps since childhood, since The Jungle Book and Shere Khan — that big cat that Mowgli faces with torches, as though fire were the only answer to its power. Perhaps also simply because of its coat: that burnt-orange background crossed by black flames, that alternation of warmth and darkness that resembles embers in motion. The Bengal tiger is not an animal like any other — it is an apparition.

Emeraude du Bengale was born of this long-held fascination. I wanted to paint the royal tiger in all its verticality, its whole body in the frame, at the moment it drinks — an instant of suspension, a grace almost contradictory with what it represents.

The composition is vertical, Japanese in spirit: flat areas of colour, simplified motifs, an economy of form that concentrates all attention on the stripes. These black flames on an orange background become the subject of the painting as much as the animal itself. The palette narrows, the details fade away — and this paring back reveals something almost abstract, graphic.

With this painting, I wanted to move away from strict naturalism towards something more graphic, more deliberate in its stylisation. Not less faithful — differently faithful. Faithful to what the tiger evokes rather than to what it is.