I am Samuel Rondiere, or Sam Elka.
I paint for something like twenty years.

If the underlying question is : “can painting still really say something meaningful about today ?”
The underlying answer would be : “of course, because only dead painters live yesterday”.

My research in painting is about its language, its grammar, its poetry.
Every language is an infinite forest of meaning, and poetry a way to open paths and draw maps of it.

When you push that language in multiple directions, even if it’s just to see what happens, you always find things that you hadn’t even imagined that could be said or things that you simply didn’t know they were there, waiting in the unseen and the untold.

I am not looking for rules : new rules, ancient rules, rules to break.
Rules come from practice : you stumble upon them any time you try to do anything. What you choose to do with them, is a choice you make only in the doing. When it comes to painting, trying and doing is the source of everything.

Painting is something material : you make an object, generally unique. And everything happens in the presence of this object.
It is very difficult to make a picture of a painting, because a painting is not really a picture. Even when it represents something figurative, it is not a picture.
It is an object : its presence physically alters the room where it stands, and therefore alters a little bit of the world, enrich its spirit – slighty or widely.

So that’s how I work : I make objects – paintings.
I paint what is, what isn’t, what I see,  what I imagine, what I remember from the past, what I keep in my own intimate cinema : emotions, ideas, perceptions, moments, places, people, situations, memories.

I try different ways to put them on a canvas, so that they can travel to another soul.

And I see if that works.

I am not generally working in series on a theme or an idea that I would unfold on a straight-line basis throughout several paintings.
I rather work in concentric circles, jumping from one thing to another, and coming back on ideas or images after a while, to then push it further or try a new direction.

I don’t believe you ever find anything, when painting.
I think you work hard looking for something and then sometimes on your way, the goddess of serendipity takes a walk with you and gives you her blessing.

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