« I am this contact zone between the contour of the form and the surroundings which constitute the space where the form is expressed. I am this space of friction, tension, softness, fusion, shock and distance which gives the work its poetic dimension. I am a concentrate of the world where so many worlds, cultures, histories and affects resonate: a heterogeneous unity of singularity, a plural expression of the multiple in a world in perpetual mutation. ».
(Goodÿ - Gilles EUGENE)
Whatever topic I'm talking about : the City, in my first exhibitions like « Multiple-Plural » in 2001 and « Urbanis » in 2002, or the Social Individual in « Distension » In 2006, the principle remains the same in the creation of the work. In all cases, reflection and research serve as support for my creation. Research in all areas : philosophical, sociological or other. The recurring geometry in the works of this period reflected, in short, a relative rigor. A permanent link between the world of the living, the spiritual and the intellectual. It came to me as an obvious fact because of my scientific curriculum and the subjects or themes studied, and also reflected a kind of confinement through more or less permeable partitions of these different spheres of our reality. By studying the city, city life, I glimpsed an increasingly strong reality full of lessons with its ravages and its advantages. A social and patrimonial life where the public and the private mix, love and hate rub shoulders, the emancipation of some to the detriment of others takes place. I then tried to deal with differences of opinion, juxtapositions, distances, approximations, precisions, rigor and nonchalance in the world, the universe, life and the spirit. All being united by Man, the animal, or more broadly by so-called living matter. A permanent balance which, at any moment, can be disturbed by the tension or expansion of all or part. I found my salvation in abstraction where only color would allow me to express or create emotions and sensations. I first expressed the city, its walls. Then, gradually, I began to do what I call « social archaeology ». That is to say, a work of highlighting the interaction between the City and Men in their living space by studying their stories and then putting them into painting; I thus gradually entered into the human who lives in the city. The subject then became a pretext summarized to its simplest expression in the representation, where the emphasis was placed on what the subject was doing rather than on the subject who does something. In the exhibition « Multiple-Plural », precisely, my concern was focused on the impact of the city on ourselves and especially on a question that arose for me: how to express the sum of my genetic, ethnic, and cultural heritage in this city through my works? For my part, at that moment, I was « multiple », by my origins, and « plural » through my expressions and my feelings. Everything I perceived in our world of the sensitive referred me to various cultures, as if all these sensibilities flowed within me. From then on, the problem of their expressions arose. Should I synthesize them into a single writing that would please the norm, or should I let my soul speak? I chose freedom, to do what moves me, despite what some people might say, « Plural ».I say it again today, I was and I am in the quest for the future of « who I am ». Without trying to connect myself to the Western slave-owning and then colonizing person who is not me, nor to the African who resembles me, but who is not me either. This acceptance of what I am : a young Guadeloupean. But, we must still dwell on the « where I come from » because, without history, the present is ambiguous and the future even more uncertain. It is from this succinct analysis that I decided to assert myself in who I am to understand my history and build my future. It is an approach that would seem to mean that what is done is done and that we should forget the past to move forward together, as we hear so well said by the « citizens of the world ». But, it is not so ! Of course, no one today is responsible for what happened 400 years ago, but we will all be responsible for the consequences of our memory lapses in the coming years.
Goodÿ – 08/08/2016
