SHADOWPAINTINGS

Les enfants d’Izieu — Series (2025– )
Night-Glow Gel on paper, glass, frame, light and shadow

This series brings together three works to date, each one anchored in the brief, luminous lives of the children of the Izieu foster home — children whose letters, full of tenderness and ordinary detail, are among the last traces they left before their deportation and murder in 1944. By translating these handwritten messages into Braille and embedding them into the image field, the artworks shift remembrance from a visual register to a tactile, bodily one. Memory becomes something that must be touched, not simply seen.

The figures themselves, rendered in layers of Night-Glow Gel and suspended behind glass, appear only partially in daylight. Their presence is fragile, almost tentative — as if resisting full disclosure. Yet in darkness, they softly illuminate themselves, reversing the usual logic of perception. What history obscures, the night reveals. What the eye overlooks, time insists upon.

Light and shadow take on the role of co-authors: they generate shifting silhouettes, doubling, erasing or resurrecting details as the viewer moves around the frame. The transparency of the glass and the relief of the gel turn the image into a living threshold between past and present. These works do not reconstruct the tragedy of Izieu; they acknowledge the impossibility of doing so. Instead, they hold space for the children’s presence — fleeting, delicate, yet insistently returning.

As the series expands, each new painting becomes another fragment of a dispersed archive: a gesture of care that preserves not only faces but voices, not only images but the intimate human warmth of the letters themselves. Together, the works form a contemporary memorial in which visibility, touch, and time converge — a quiet, glowing reminder that memory’s task is never complete.