I've been fifty thousand times to the Louvre. I have copied everything in drawing, trying to understand.
Only reality interests me now and I know I could spend the rest of my life in copying a chair.
Once the object has been constructed, I have a tendency to discover in it, transformed and displaced, images, impressions, facts which have deeply moved me.
I've tried doing so, for it was never my intention to paint only with gray. But in the course of my work I have eliminated one color after another, and what has remained is gray, gray, gray!
All I can do will only ever be a faint image of what I see and my success will always be less than my failure or perhaps equal to the failure.
If only someone else could paint what I see, it would be marvellous, because then I wouldn't have to paint at all.
All the sculptures of today, like those of the past, will end one day in pieces... So it is important to fashion ones work carefully in its smallest recess and charge every particle of matter with life.
In every work of art the subject is primordial, whether the artist knows it or not. The measure of the formal qualities is only a sign of the measure of the artist's obsession with his subject; the form is always in proportion to the obsession.
I paint and sculpt to get a grip on reality... to protect myself.
