You painted directly on the gallery walls. Why?

I work on site because I am directly addressing the place. I am directly ‘targeting’ the museum’s white walls. Emma Lavigne’s invitation consisted of contaminating the exhibition space to turn it into a symbolic space, a dreamlike space, and a space for historical projection. The meeting of the two materials, the white wall and the rubber, has left a trace with this stain, this landscape of contamination that we see around it. This is the imprint left by the material upon its passage. Some places still deliver material. The rubber remains stuck to the wall like something damp.  

What does on-site painting do that a traditional painting does not?

This isn’t painting in the traditional sense of the term. For me, it’s a gesture of change that involves giving an emotional, sensorial, and historical charge to the site. It’s truly the rubber as a material that leaves its imprint. The painting creates a landscape in the absolute. This imprint, this contamination of the walls deals with a landscape that is composed of various layers and colours, and which shifts depending on the various exhibition sites. It’s a window onto a grey chromatic space, a conceptual, melancholy space that can be recomposed, depending on the exhibition spaces.

What was the reason for this chromatic choice?

We have a grey that appears gradually, as the result of the succession of layers applied in various orders and opacities, such that they bring about their own cancellation or demolition. The ambient grey indeed suffocates the intensity of the colours, even though they are ultimately shown at the edges of the image, at its periphery. They make each other grey, like a spent breath. The dominant colour pulls us towards the night and towards darkness. This for me was a kind of gestural, physical, and corporeal struggle between the desire to retain the light of the first colours (the cadmiums) and to apply darkness, night, i.e., blackness and oppression. This is also a reflection on our contaminated soils, as I am alluding to the dioxins and herbicides that were poured into the ground in Vietnam. The idea is darkness, black. And night is never totally black; it is imbued with other colours. Purple is predominant in this grey table. It also forms part of the colours of the six herbicides that make up The Rainbow Herbicides, which comes from the name of the spraying carried out by the US army during its operations in Vietnam. We can also see this purple, this violet, this ultraviolet in Pénétrable, here directly on the walls, like an imprint. The material has literally been spilled and the wall has been sprayed. Purple is a colour that we find in nature. I wanted something totally anachronistic. It’s also tied to the pigment I use, which has an extremely chemical composition, and which helps the whiteness of the rubber, which has a certain purity, to deviate. 

How did you fit your work into the building of the Bourse de Commerce? Did its cylindrical form play a role in this work? 

The marouflage canvas in the Rotunda is magnificent. It's a true feat and, at the same time, it reveals moments in history that are sometimes turbulent or tense. Ultimately it’s a witness to history, a colonial history as well, on which our gaze dwells considerably these days. I wanted two landscapes to form a dialogue by getting two moments in history, two languages to meet. Gallery 7 allows us to look through the windows and address winter in the marouflage canvas. We think of winter as being very cold, but the canvas has what almost seems like a sunset, this low light that is warm and orange-tinted. It’s what we see in the light that persists in Les Couleurs du gris. I would say that the dialogue was pretty clear to me. It wasn’t forced. By getting people to look at the architectural and historical details, I think visitors can find themselves caught between two masses, one tangible and the other intangible. And they can decide whether they want to live this experience as a purely aesthetic, almost abstract contemplation, or as an intellectual experience. These materials refer to the built structure, to melancholy, to a certain violence of history embodied in the picturesque paintings and in what constitutes our memory.

Could you say that this work is like a wound of history on the building, a “bruise”, as Emma Lavigne, the exhibition curator, called it?

Pénétrable is always a surprise. Once the skin forms, the rubber is lifted off. The rubber sticks; there’s a real resistance. It's about making contact, almost like casting a mould. This mould reveals different layers of the wall, different histories, and different pasts. Depending on the museum, institution, or site, there are even certain wall paintings from years past that have resurfaced from time to time. There is also this idea that subterranean stains can be hidden, but that this immaculate white ultimately cannot sustain this notion of purity of a virgin, innocent wall. So, yes, in some ways, the wounds, what she calls “bruises” refer to that, to the blue of the bruise. Hence, the violet. It’s subterranean. It surfaces. In my work, I think a lot about Philip Roth’s book The Human Stain. That’s what it’s about, ultimately: how we all negotiate our imperfections. Aren’t we composed, made up of a wall full of stains of changes and imperfections, rather than of a white wall, a white space?

You use colours that are “toxic” in tone. Why?

The colours that make up The Rainbow Herbicides are white, pink, blue, purple, green, and orange (agent orange is the best known). They stained my mental space with a presence, with drama. I use rather strong pigments: cadmiums, cobalts, nickel, phthalo blue, which are all toxic oxides. I am questioning the degree of toxicity of any material or colour, even symbolically. it’s the soil and minerals that will soften them. As if a telluric force were ultimately offsetting these oxides, these alloys, this toxicity that we as humans can also produce. 

What are you striving for in these vast, monochrome landscapes?

These landscapes are not monochrome to me; they are bursting with colours. I am also after a sense of wonder. We never associate wonder with toxicity, but the work’s title does feature both the terms “rainbow” and “herbicides”.  There is a way in which our imaginations are colonised with this bellicose semantics, which uses misleading names: “the thread dust” for agent orange and the “the rainbow herbicides”.  Words have a very strong impact. This contemplative field that I'm trying to find, to rediscover, somehow makes it possible for me to untie things. That’s why the colours free themselves at the edges. I am also trying to reestablish an autonomy of colour. What is beautiful here, in this section that we see, is that we can see the rainbow.

“What does the title “Before the Storm” inspire in you?

It’s above all my body that feels activated when I hear that title. Isn’t it our body that primarily receives the impacts of a change in nature and climate? I always remember the rains in the tropical forests of Vietnam. I believe that the body is a receptacle for this. The body is the first thing to be affected by these changes and this disruption. We can feel the storm coming. We don’t experience it in our thoughts. We feel it. To me, it suggests the moment when the body finds itself in transition. It knows that the storm, that the rain is coming. It’s on alert. It’s already in transition, in preparation. It’s experiencing turbulence. The light is changing, the blue. The purple is settling in. It’s a very singular moment.

What is your favourite meteorological event?

I was really struck by the tropical rains as I searched for a rubber tree plantation at the edge of the Amazon. I experienced these dense tropical forests. There's a feeling of joy and something very pleasurable about getting so much rain, so much strength, getting it in this way.

What is your relationship to nature and to the non-human?

I had a singular experience on this very search as I travelled upstream on the Amazon River, along the rain forest without ever reaching it. I thought that this space was immutable, impenetrable, dense, and autonomous. Ultimately that it wasn’t for us. Once you penetrate it, the meandering begins. You forget what you’re looking for in the face of these supremely autonomous forms onto which we cannot impose any of our opinions. I witnessed a tapping, which is when the tree yields the rubber. It’s this fragile, gentle moment when a white milk forms, and you have this pure whiteness that drips bit by bit. That sequence represents my inner landscape. All of my body and all my senses were awakened. And I think that is what I am trying to express. It’s about being faithful to this emotional and sensorial space that I was given when I had these experiences in nature.

To which season of the year do you most look forward?

My first name in Vietnamese, “Thu Van”, means “autumn cloud”.  That’s my season.

Which season would you hate to see disappear?

There is a beautiful, animated film called Weathering With You. It depicts a world with no more sun, no more light, and the waters have risen and flooded the cities. It takes place in Tokyo, which is totally submerged, and one of the characters can get the sun to come back by sacrificing himself and disappearing, bit by bit. It’s all about the balance between “being there” and letting the sun shine through. I think it’s the lack of sunlight that I would fear the most.

Are you afraid of the coming storm?

It's true that when you feel the storm coming, you are pretty scared, of course. The light changes and dips. The coming storm is what we are already living through. It’s the recent heat waves we’ve lived through this summer.