The reinforced clay works are made on stainless steel wire mesh covered with clay, then painted with slip (natural clay like ochre or coloured clay with metal oxides like copper, iron, manganese, antimony, etc.).

This slip can be polished or engraved. The creations are then fired very quickly (7-8 minutes) at 1000°C under a ceramic fibre cloche with a Jet burner on top. I use texture, adding masking pieces to develop cracks and relief to the surface. The firing process adds its own quirks too. The pieces are then cooled immediately.
I try to use the possibilities and particularities of the clay and fire in my painting, with all the transformations and surprises it brings.

In most of his work, Christian Destieu uses photographs as a raw material, a way of including an element of reality.
The painted image shifts the initial representation to introduce new points of entry and fashion the anecdote. These are images of images: a way of creating a mise en abyme with reality, using pictorial processes that create distance from that same reality.

Firing contributes its transformations, accidents and hazards to this process. In short, it is a kind of counter-image.