"Unfaithful"

The title owes nothing to chance. During the rut, from mid-September to early October, the male deer abandons all discretion. It bellows, it charges, it defends its territory — and mates with as many does as possible. Faithless by nature, by necessity, by instinct. The name says something true about this animal that the hunting tradition has always clothed in a form of virile grandeur.

This painting has a particular history: it was made as part of a fifty-two-minute documentary for the Seasons channel, directed by David Flacard and Laurent Buchemeyer. For six months, they followed me — from the first observations of the rut in the northern Médoc through to the presentation of the finished painting at the Game Fair in Lamotte Beuvron. A long, immersive process that always begins by listening before painting.

For the composition, I chose maximum close-up. The deer does not fit within the frame — it overflows it. The head raised, the mouth wide open in the cry of the rut, the antlers spreading across the full width of the horizontal format: everything is excess, disproportion, urgency. This is the instant when the animal is most itself — and least discreet.

The light of the damp Médoc morning is what I sought to render above all. Not a clear light — a diffuse, blue-toned light that envelops the deer in mist and makes its breath appear like a flame. The palette is deliberately restrained: grey, beige, warm ochre on the antlers. Oil paint allows one to work these subtle gradations, these imperceptible passages between fur and fog, between the animal and its environment.