Rue principale, 2005

In the central area of the ancient plan of a French convent the artist has inserted the drawing of a room viewed from above, with seven paintings on the walls1 having geometric designs (rhombuses, squares, squaring of the surface, etc.). At the centre of that room, nine squares placed close together to form a square composition offer drawings similar to the ones associated with the paintings on the walls of the room; the ensemble of nine squares is marked by the intersection of the diagonals, outlined in red and continuing in the plan's perimetral "frame".
The construction of the overall image, which alternates different optical planes, offers a series of frames that, assisted by the diagonals, project the gaze straight towards the centre and, at the same time, bring it back to the image plane. The optical vanishing point – the small square at the centre of the sheet – is yet another frame. In other words: the arrival is not the vision of a painting, but rather the idea of the Painting as the spatial frame, the limit of the space of the representation. Similarly, the abstract motifs of the various "paintings" allude to the countless possible faces of a potential painting.
The “Rue principale” (French for "Main Way") referred to in the title harkens back to the street indicated in the plan at the lower left, overlooked by the building. Broadly speaking, the “main way” is the perspective that leads the gaze towards a presumed vision: the key route that through a spatial frame allows for access to the particular dimension of a painting.
The motif of a space viewed from above that frames a composition of squares was also used in 2007 in an original variant on paper (GPC-1037).

1 The drawing of the room viewed from above, with seven paintings on the walls and two sculptures up against one of the sides, dates to 1998-99 (cf. among the works on paper GPC-0924, GPC-0976, GPC-0977, GPC-0978, among the paintings GPO-0828, GPO-0830); the same drawing reappeared in 2012 in the print Le jeune dessinateur (GPE-0127) and in 2015 in other works on paper (cf. GPC-1484, GPC-1486, GPC-1856).