The idea of the "premeditated" ideal landscape, haunted me since that time when I perceived Poussin as a major poetic figure and the Italo-French landscapes of the XVIIth century
as the representatives of the golden age of painting.

This tradition, this classical ideal, this celestial union of the geometric and the spiritual, this balance between sensuality and rigour - all things which have deserted the field of art - were the bedrock of my reflection for this canvas which may appear intellectual but never made me forget the finality of this dream of art, delectation - Poussinesque word par excellence, which definitively places me in the margin of the current tendencies.
However, since this Olympus of the painted thought, from ruptures to reactions, what has art gained or lost art until now? In spite of the plethoric development of theses on this question, I want to be the last to hold brushes to express these regrets or these losses.
To approach these problems as a painter led me to choose a kind of ferryman scientist - authentic art historian of the XVII th century whose speciality - the portrait - delivered him, mischievously, to my approach. Its theatrical situation, in the foreground, and the characteristics of the lighting - constrain the spectator in osmosis to slow down time to wander in this mental Arcadia with him.
His eyes launch a golden section towards the summits of the urn and the pyramid, which projects vertically this line towards the top of the glorious cupola. But the principal axis of the meditation is a large diagonal, which passes by the urn, the tomb then the palace of the spirit before finishing on Olympus.
Death, centre of the elegiac configuration, knowledge, the flow of time, the precariousness of happiness, the ideal city, calm and nurturing waters, the couple of trees, the sombre animal reflecting the negative side of our enterprises, evoke the loss of a theatre of the thought where man dialogued with the world.

I wanted ultimately, like Poussin exposing his intentions to his patrons, to set up a simple and cordial rhetoric, but the melancholy twilight, which bathes the canvas where the storm has just passed, tells you that to paint now is more despairing than in the XVIIth century.