CHRISTINE SAFA - De chair et de pierre

Christine Safa's paintings are born of the recollection of sensations experienced some time earlier, even before the idea of painting had materialised. Sensations of dry heat, of enveloping torpor, of summer heat that numbs the body, of immersion in water that gives everything around a sense of unreality. These sensations are first and foremost physical, in moments when the body, in the absolute of its presence in the world, once again becomes the only channel through which the visible can be accessed simply but fully.

Back in the studio, the memory of these sensations comes flooding back like a wave, imperious and unpremeditated. Nothing has been forgotten. The sensations have remained latent, and have been swollen with memories and other images that have been superimposed and given new forms to the original image. The layers of paint, the confusion of colours, the imprecision of contours all tell of the difficulty of remembering precisely the things experienced, their shape, their density.

Christine Safa's use of colour - pure pigments ground and mixed with oil - links her practice to the heritage of the 15th-century Italian Primitives and to the brilliance of the frescoes found in Pompeian villas painted in the 1st century BC. The uniqueness of the surface of her paintings, prepared with marble powder, traditionally used in the composition of painted plaster, recalls the soft, hard surface of these ancient frescoes.

Perfectly aware of the transience of time, Christine Safa tends to endow with a memory that which is doomed to fade, to disappear. The light of the rising sun, the softness of an embrace, the blossoming of a bouquet - nothing lasts. The artist deposits immaterial, fleeting moments on his support before it dries, before it sets completely, as one might say of a coating. Drying gives the surface the appearance of solid limestone. The paint becomes stone. The ephemeral becomes sealed, "imprisoned" in the surface.

• Christine Safa