For the most part we are prey and we would like to do without predators.

Sometimes the wildebeest get carried away and trample on the crocodiles waiting for them at the bend in the river, but this is not their true nature. They only break away from it because of the panic that grips them.

Gregarious and passive, rather than pacifist, an attitude that calls for action, we are similar to the wildebeest or any other prey so designated by the evolution of the species. Despite our strength and our powerful horns, we do not disembowel the hunter. We accept an unjustified death before the end, when it would be so easy for us to make a shapeless pulp of this arrogant menace walking around with his rifle under his arm. Our numbers seem to us a weak asset. We don't know that we are strong because we don't recognise ourselves in this 'we', except when it is suddenly too late.

We the prey

We, the prey, have no idea of the audacity to anticipate the future that is obviously taking shape before our eyes at every moment. Howling and bleating we head for the slaughterhouse, enjoying a little on the way, distracting ourselves with the appetizing green grass, smelling the fresh air, admiring the sun as an unattainable glory.

We follow hypothetical guides walking far ahead, invisible to our eyes except in images; for our benefit, governing us.

Technically dominating nature completely will one day prove to be much easier than ever having the upper hand over our own nature

And how could it be possible, since we cannot detach ourselves from it?

Is it a forever unattainable option for prey to one day become predators, deciding their fate by the grace of a brand new courage, for us who only know how to defend ourselves after having been hit? This is of course not enough when others are born to kill.

Nature is not about equality, but about the balance of power

It is even less freedom or fraternity. It is a difficult exercise for us, as a species with the ambition of escaping from itself, to strive for fundamentals that do not exist, or exist only to a limited extent, in the state of nature. Nothing is further from its functioning and laws than our societal precepts. What would it make of this equality, this unlimited fraternity that would contradict its very foundations?

To recognise the truth of the human is to consider the animal first. Looking a truth in the face is the first step of knowledge. The second, which makes civilisation and then culture, is not necessarily to adhere to it. To educate oneself is precisely to choose to fight against or to encourage parts of one's nature. It means doing sustainable agriculture on the areas of one's own land that have first been restored to their wild state. One must consider oneself at least once in this way, humbly animal, realistically animal before considering oneself human. To do this, one must not be superstitiously adoring of angelism or fanatically denying desire. You have to give yourself over to the frightening listening of all your impulses, which, once again, does not imply living them.

On a species level, what could be more natural than infanticide or racism? Do animals tolerate each other without compensation? It is not an apology for our violent instincts to accept them for what they are; quite the contrary. I say again that it is because we recognise them as intrinsically natural, without making ourselves out to be demigods, that we can set about fighting, constraining or modifying our uncivilised inclinations and in so doing find the opportunity to understand ourselves better.

Through the media Judas, the prey hear and see, petrified

At the cost of horror at home, terrorists, or more soberly, mass murderers, have come to remind us of what the world's daily life is still largely about: a succession of bloodbaths. The rest of us had somewhat forgotten this, at least in our flesh.

This does not mean that we thank them for this despicable reminder.

Just as I imagine that for an American artist it must be difficult to ignore September 11, 2001, I believe it is impossible, even incongruous, for the French equivalent not to be influenced by the shockwave of the attacks that hit us on Friday, November 13, 2015, perhaps even more than those of January of the same year. Obviously not in the sense that such events would become the systematic subject of our creations, but rather in the sense that a brush cup shaken by a violent tremor, more intentional than clumsy, would have spilled its dirty water, tinged with a black and scarlet mixture, onto our drawings in progress.

Like the grain of the paper, artists or not, we drink in spite of ourselves what we can absorb until we are saturated. Our need for absorption is impossible to satisfy.

But the puddle, a red pool of blood and the abysmal blackness of our questioning and uncertainties, is far from being completely drained and continues to spread at the slightest quiver in the air. The stunned, panting and fearful prey dare not drink from it. They think only of their fate.

Stunned, stunned, dumbfounded, fanaticised...

Our sensitive bodies suffer the backlash of a still vague awareness of a disorder that escapes us as much as it escapes our societies. Catatonia lurks. And yet, here, without waiting, is what comes next.

It is a strange and bizarre situation for body and mind: painful by proxy when they are not hit hard themselves. Those who have not lost anything find themselves, albeit differently, equally downcast; imagining for a time their own lives, their loves or their friends suddenly cut short. How? We know. Movies, novels and shows have made us feel it a thousand times. By fantasy, by projection. It is enough for a moment to place one's entire mind at the heart of the pain to feel the horror that we have been spared. Yes, even when experienced by proxy, horror is nevertheless a subject to be considered anew in our art and in our lives.

Recalling our postures and preoccupations chronologically, the unfolding of these hours of our lives is twisted and entwined like a DNA fibre in the helix of another parallel time. That of the supposed preparation of events. Rung after rung, an infernal mental construction makes us climb the scaffolding of terrible moments irrevocably interlocked to the top of a pyramid in the glory of cruelty. "When I was there, what were they doing? Them, the killers, and those others of us who in a few hours were going to die and still didn't know it.

So what else can be shown?

Faced with the fascinating impregnation of the bestial violence of the acts, can we show without ridicule what inhabits us, other than our powerlessness and how the unfolding of reality has underlined it?

The very notion of a 'spectacle', in the sense of people coming to see something 'invented', becomes even more physically insurmountable and intellectually utterly obsolete to me as I imagine what happened recently not on a battlefield or in the streets of a devastated city, but in a concert hall, in other words, a theatre. How sadistically and deliberately ironic that a place that is all about illusion should become the scene of death inflicted in real time!

In the end, only that which has been deeply experienced or lived through can be shown. This is everything that a spectator of shows, cinema, exhibitions and museums, confined to the state of a tourist, will never be able to experience in programmed fiction. For my part, I have chosen and continue to choose not to show through the end of a spyglass, nor to look through a porthole, what it is impossible for me to really see. I only have to offer and arouse the reflection of a lived feeling.

In my current vision, therefore, the only time that the remnants of our wilderness have any chance of recognising and evolving is during a walk through the interlacing of a tropical greenhouse, during a stroll through the population of an animal reserve and in front of the spectacle of the parked theatre of our daily lives.

What will the prey be capable of?

What should I aspire to now that the world I have to live in seems to me a threat? The effort required of my conscience has become enormous. The world stood in front of my door to tell me that it exists. It rang the bell and I made the mistake of opening it. It rushed into my den like a canvasser eager to sell its Bibles and life insurance.

My poor bubble suddenly expanded to the dimensions of the planet...