I am Samuel Rondiere : painter, film director, writer.

As a painter, I often go by the name Sam Elka.
I am painting for something like twenty years now.
I didn’t become an artist because I wanted to become one.
I became an artist the day I took a look at my life and couldn’t help but realize that I was actually living backwards.
The time and space I had constantly managed throughout the years to keep working creation wasn’t a break in the flow of life.
It was the flow of my life.
There would have been for me no flow at all if I’d quit that.

Should I sum up in a very few words my focus when painting, I’d say these words could be :
“oh, let me tell you that story”.

I am under the impression that a lot ot people believe painting is a nice thing from the past.
With video, with A.I., with the movies and the TV and internet, with the digital, etc, painting seems like a nice tradition that we enjoy to perpetuate, but without real impact on the world.

I believe it’s quite the opposite.
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”.

Painting has a very long history throughout the world.
So for sure, that feels quite heavy to carry on your back, when you begin to put colors on a canvas.
But that history is nothing more than the history of mankind.
Does that mean however that we, as human beings, are not anymore meaningful today ?

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.

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

And I see what happens.

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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