"I'm watching you"

Kenya, Masai Mara, fourth day of safari. For the first time, I had brought my two children with me — those who had watched me paint lions all their lives, but who had never seen one in the wild. That day, we came upon this superb male who had just killed a wildebeest. He stood up to hide his prey in a thicket, turned back — and planted his eyes in mine. No aggression. Just a look that said it all: I've got my eye on you.

To do justice to that moment, there was only one way: to paint the lion at full size. A direct confrontation, no distancing possible. The lion occupies the entire format, frontal gaze, the prey still in his mouth. The tight framing leaves no escape: you are in the scene.

Oil paint allows here a precision that borders on the documentary — every nuance of the African light, every hair of the mane still in the movement of rising, every detail of the wildebeest in the mouth — while remaining a painting. It is that tension between raw reality and the artistic act that hyperrealist work seeks.

This painting sometimes provokes incomprehension — even rejection. Viewers have reproached me for painting a scene of violence. That reaction says something about our times: a society increasingly disconnected from the living, that forgets that hunting for food is as old as life itself. I am not here to tell a reassuring story — neither Bambi nor The Lion King. I paint life as it is, with its moments of grace and its dramatic moments. That lion's gaze, I wanted it frontal and unequivocal: because truth deserves to be looked straight in the face.