Between 1978 -1984 Herve Constant produced painting after painting, yet within a year of his first sojourn in painting, he was painting in a completely different and new way. By a process of deliberation and control the body of his paintings were carefully composed. One sees how an artist gradually moves through different phases, from figurative to abstraction and back again. The wild, though expertly handled colours of his abstractions can be read as joyful evocations demonstrating an artist’s virtuosity, but really, they are another mode of expressing his own personal anguish. The vision of the world which he has to offer is peculiar to himself, despite its borrowing from the French past.

You are a young painter, what has influenced you most? I believe influences act on the unconscious. You discover them after the event. They often come out after a work has been done. You could not say I was influenced by one painter more that any other. Influences work in a natural way. That is why you take them for what they are: you know everybody else has them too. What is important is your work and what is going on around you. What appears in my pictures is a world of dreams, of creative freedom: I want to create my own world. It would be the extension of a story, each has his own points of reference, his bias, his conscious and unconscious world. So much the better if others can share i