Autel (J’étais)

The work is based on a ruin in the village of Étais, in Burgundy, not far away from my studio. Judging from the style of the remnants, it was a late sixteenth-century shrine, probably holding a statue of the Madonna and Child. It’s right on the road, visible to all passers-by. The village is on the old road to Santiago de Compostela, a destination which is hundreds of kilometres from here. Pilgrims from the north sometimes, as an expression of devotion, walked all the way. This was most likely a donation, commissioned by the owner of the Château d’Étais, which is no longer standing, for the benefit of those pilgrims on their journey. I can only guess, but it’s probable that it was wrecked during the French Revolution, then walled up with detritus and junk, no longer sanctified.
I found it to still have a presence. I amped up the colour relationships, but the thing had an amazing kind of aura around it that mystified me. I just hyperbolised what was already there, palpable in the way the whole thing was decaying, covered with mould and growing a skin of microorganisms. It glowed, in a wonderful state of what I would call putrifactio in an alchemical sense. It spoke to me, reminding me of something older than Christianity.

It’s significant to me that this shrine is located in Étais, the verb étais being the first-person singular form of être in the past imperfect tense. J’étais means I was.  
Incidentally, Compostela is medieval Galician/Spanish,(from Latin Campus Stellae) meaning “field of stars”. The legend of the Way of St. James states that the stars in the Milky Way would guide pilgrims to his tomb. The treatment of the ground is my way of remembering the sacred manner in which Renaissance painters reserved ultramarine blue for the robes of the Virgin. She is the Ground, she is the Starry Sky.
Having said all this, it is my hope and expectation that viewers will love this painting without having to know the story or the context. I want my work to escape the confines of geography and history.