I paint inner climates.
Spaces where colour becomes density, light or movement, where a presence may appear and then seem on the verge of withdrawing. These climates emerge through a face, condense within the envelope of a chrysalis, open up the space of a doorway, or unfold into expanses of colour until what could still be named begins to waver. My images often exist at the threshold, where figuration and abstraction cease to oppose one another, where a form may appear without ever fully closing in on what it is. Something remains elusive. A vibration persists within the image, like the memory of a movement held in suspension.
My practice unfolds primarily through inks on paper. Water is its essential matter. I compose with it as much as I listen to it. It carries colour beyond the gesture that first laid it down, permeates the paper, shifts its contours and sometimes continues on its course in my absence. This element of unpredictability does not mean relinquishing agency, but continually adjusting the measure of my intervention. Allowing it to act is not the same as simply letting it happen. When I return to a painting, something has taken place. What I left behind has shifted, diffused, sometimes almost disappeared. Yet the gesture remains, in another form. Matter thus inscribes the memory of its own transformations.
I am drawn to the images I paint when they still contain the possibility of becoming other, when a tension persists within them. Doors without hinges or locks open onto shifting passages. They no longer truly separate a here from an elsewhere. The threshold itself becomes a space to inhabit. A chrysalis appears motionless, yet within it everything is moving. The form before us already contains the one to come while retaining the trace of the one that is fading away. Elsewhere, the figure withdraws and colour expands until it creates its own climate. I seek images present enough to be recognised, yet open enough never to be entirely fixed.
It is within this interval that dialectic runs through my painting. For me, it is not a theory to be represented, but a tension to be sustained. Within a single image, several states may remain simultaneously active without having to resolve themselves. Appearance and withdrawal, permanence and metamorphosis, movement and stillness can thus persist within one another.
Painting therefore calls for a form of restraint. I seek that precise moment when further intervention might dispel what has just appeared. The image holds while continuing to vibrate. Movement has been suspended without disappearing. I stop when the form acquires this particular presence, determined enough to exist, unstable enough to remain alive.
To paint an inner climate would be to attempt to capture what moves through us without holding it still, what persists precisely because it transforms. In this ceaseless metamorphosis, water remains for me the most intimate mirror of what we are.
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Through painting, I attempt to render fragments of the complexity of reality.
My practice originates in my inability to apprehend the world through a dualistic conception that reduces this complexity to binary oppositions and forces contraries to exclude one another. In place of this logic, I turn to dialectics, understood as the active coexistence of several states without one abolishing the other. It lies at the core of my work and responds to a profound necessity, to hold things together without reducing them. I seek to inscribe this necessity within painting. Painting then becomes a space where several realities can extend into one another without merging, where a form can appear without fully closing in on what it is. It refuses to let any single state exhaust what is present.
My pictorial practice unfolds primarily through inks on paper. Water is its central material and the point where pictorial experience and thought meet.
Water has always seemed to me the most intimate mirror through which to explore the soul, because it embodies the ambivalence that lies at the heart of our being. Painting with it engages my practice in a profound dialectic, an unresolved dialectic and, as such, a living tension. I find something of this intuition in the thought of Gaston Bachelard. Water is that “transitory element,” caught in an “essential destiny that endlessly metamorphoses the substance of being.” Its continuity does not lie in the permanence of a state, but in its capacity to become other. Transformation does not necessarily entail the loss of what was.
To paint with water is to enter into a material that continues its course beyond my gesture. It brings me back to a form of humility, to that precise position from which I can act while remaining attentive to what emerges. Allowing it to act is not the same as simply letting it happen. It means working with a material that possesses its own agency, recognising what it brings forth without immediately seeking to close it down. Mastery thus becomes fluid, moving from the gesture that guides to one that receives, from intervention to waiting, before returning to the painting in response to what has emerged.
Time belongs intimately to this dialogue. When I return to a painting, something has taken place in my absence. I no longer encounter exactly the gesture I left there, but what water, ink and paper have made of it. Painting becomes a temporal conversation with itself, in which the memory of the gesture encounters what matter has made of it.
For me, memory lies in this persistence through transformation. Rather than preserving what was, it allows it to continue acting within what emerges. Several temporalities can therefore inhabit the present of a work at once. A vanished state continues to inflect the one that follows it, while a new presence still carries something of what preceded it. What was does not remain intact; it remains transformed.
This relationship between persistence and transformation leads to another central question in my work, that of identity. To be identifiable does not mean to be fixed. An identity can hold several states, several temporalities, several possibilities of itself. It is also constituted through its metamorphoses. It can become other while retaining a relationship with what it has been. The same returns as other.
This conception runs through the plurality of my pictorial languages, from highly determined figures to fields where colour unfolds in rhythms and effusions. These forms do not seek to produce a common appearance. They are different states of the same inquiry. The identity of my practice lies in the persistence of the same tensions through the transformation of its forms. Its coherence can therefore shift with them, holding things together without reducing them, allowing them to vary without losing what binds them.
What I ultimately seek in the act of painting is a very precise moment, which I call the point juste de vibration, the instant when several states remain active without any one of them definitively taking possession of the image. The form is present enough to hold, yet open enough to retain within itself what might still emerge. It appears without closing the field of its possibilities.
Recognising this point calls for restraint. Restraint is not a style of painting, but a way of keeping the work open without destroying the tension that holds it. To stop no longer means to finish, but to know when to preserve what has emerged, suspending the gesture before any further intervention resolves what still needs to remain alive.
The Stillstand perhaps concentrates this inquiry most intensely, “a sudden halt between two movements, one that virtually contracts measure and memory within its own internal tension, in a motionless pause charged at once with memory and dynamic energy.” The halt does not abolish movement. It gathers it in. What appears motionless remains charged with what has passed through it and with what might yet set it in motion again. The present becomes less a fixed state than a site of tension between memory and becoming.
It is perhaps here that painting touches, for me, upon something of our own condition, the possibility of remaining without staying the same, of becoming other without erasing what moves through us, of inhabiting several states of ourselves without having to reduce them to a single definition.
I do not paint only what takes place within matter. Through it, I seek what matter transforms in us.
I paint inner climates.
Spaces where colour becomes density, light or movement, where a presence may appear and then seem on the verge of withdrawing. These climates emerge through a face, condense within the envelope of a chrysalis, open up the space of a doorway, or unfold into expanses of colour until what could still be named begins to waver. My images often exist at the threshold, where figuration and abstraction cease to oppose one another, where a form may appear without ever fully closing in on what it is. Something remains elusive. A vibration persists within the image, like the memory of a movement held in suspension.
My practice unfolds primarily through inks on paper. Water is its essential matter. I compose with it as much as I listen to it. It carries colour beyond the gesture that first laid it down, permeates the paper, shifts its contours and sometimes continues on its course in my absence. This element of unpredictability does not mean relinquishing agency, but continually adjusting the measure of my intervention. Allowing it to act is not the same as simply letting it happen. When I return to a painting, something has taken place. What I left behind has shifted, diffused, sometimes almost disappeared. Yet the gesture remains, in another form. Matter thus inscribes the memory of its own transformations.
I am drawn to the images I paint when they still contain the possibility of becoming other, when a tension persists within them. Doors without hinges or locks open onto shifting passages. They no longer truly separate a here from an elsewhere. The threshold itself becomes a space to inhabit. A chrysalis appears motionless, yet within it everything is moving. The form before us already contains the one to come while retaining the trace of the one that is fading away. Elsewhere, the figure withdraws and colour expands until it creates its own climate. I seek images present enough to be recognised, yet open enough never to be entirely fixed.
It is within this interval that dialectic runs through my painting. For me, it is not a theory to be represented, but a tension to be sustained. Within a single image, several states may remain simultaneously active without having to resolve themselves. Appearance and withdrawal, permanence and metamorphosis, movement and stillness can thus persist within one another.
Painting therefore calls for a form of restraint. I seek that precise moment when further intervention might dispel what has just appeared. The image holds while continuing to vibrate. Movement has been suspended without disappearing. I stop when the form acquires this particular presence, determined enough to exist, unstable enough to remain alive.
To paint an inner climate would be to attempt to capture what moves through us without holding it still, what persists precisely because it transforms. In this ceaseless metamorphosis, water remains for me the most intimate mirror of what we are.
---
Through painting, I attempt to render fragments of the complexity of reality.
My practice originates in my inability to apprehend the world through a dualistic conception that reduces this complexity to binary oppositions and forces contraries to exclude one another. In place of this logic, I turn to dialectics, understood as the active coexistence of several states without one abolishing the other. It lies at the core of my work and responds to a profound necessity, to hold things together without reducing them. I seek to inscribe this necessity within painting. Painting then becomes a space where several realities can extend into one another without merging, where a form can appear without fully closing in on what it is. It refuses to let any single state exhaust what is present.
My pictorial practice unfolds primarily through inks on paper. Water is its central material and the point where pictorial experience and thought meet.
Water has always seemed to me the most intimate mirror through which to explore the soul, because it embodies the ambivalence that lies at the heart of our being. Painting with it engages my practice in a profound dialectic, an unresolved dialectic and, as such, a living tension. I find something of this intuition in the thought of Gaston Bachelard. Water is that “transitory element,” caught in an “essential destiny that endlessly metamorphoses the substance of being.” Its continuity does not lie in the permanence of a state, but in its capacity to become other. Transformation does not necessarily entail the loss of what was.
To paint with water is to enter into a material that continues its course beyond my gesture. It brings me back to a form of humility, to that precise position from which I can act while remaining attentive to what emerges. Allowing it to act is not the same as simply letting it happen. It means working with a material that possesses its own agency, recognising what it brings forth without immediately seeking to close it down. Mastery thus becomes fluid, moving from the gesture that guides to one that receives, from intervention to waiting, before returning to the painting in response to what has emerged.
Time belongs intimately to this dialogue. When I return to a painting, something has taken place in my absence. I no longer encounter exactly the gesture I left there, but what water, ink and paper have made of it. Painting becomes a temporal conversation with itself, in which the memory of the gesture encounters what matter has made of it.
For me, memory lies in this persistence through transformation. Rather than preserving what was, it allows it to continue acting within what emerges. Several temporalities can therefore inhabit the present of a work at once. A vanished state continues to inflect the one that follows it, while a new presence still carries something of what preceded it. What was does not remain intact; it remains transformed.
This relationship between persistence and transformation leads to another central question in my work, that of identity. To be identifiable does not mean to be fixed. An identity can hold several states, several temporalities, several possibilities of itself. It is also constituted through its metamorphoses. It can become other while retaining a relationship with what it has been. The same returns as other.
This conception runs through the plurality of my pictorial languages, from highly determined figures to fields where colour unfolds in rhythms and effusions. These forms do not seek to produce a common appearance. They are different states of the same inquiry. The identity of my practice lies in the persistence of the same tensions through the transformation of its forms. Its coherence can therefore shift with them, holding things together without reducing them, allowing them to vary without losing what binds them.
What I ultimately seek in the act of painting is a very precise moment, which I call the point juste de vibration, the instant when several states remain active without any one of them definitively taking possession of the image. The form is present enough to hold, yet open enough to retain within itself what might still emerge. It appears without closing the field of its possibilities.
Recognising this point calls for restraint. Restraint is not a style of painting, but a way of keeping the work open without destroying the tension that holds it. To stop no longer means to finish, but to know when to preserve what has emerged, suspending the gesture before any further intervention resolves what still needs to remain alive.
The Stillstand perhaps concentrates this inquiry most intensely, “a sudden halt between two movements, one that virtually contracts measure and memory within its own internal tension, in a motionless pause charged at once with memory and dynamic energy.” The halt does not abolish movement. It gathers it in. What appears motionless remains charged with what has passed through it and with what might yet set it in motion again. The present becomes less a fixed state than a site of tension between memory and becoming.
It is perhaps here that painting touches, for me, upon something of our own condition, the possibility of remaining without staying the same, of becoming other without erasing what moves through us, of inhabiting several states of ourselves without having to reduce them to a single definition.
I do not paint only what takes place within matter. Through it, I seek what matter transforms in us.
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Full of Uncertainty.
We live at a pivotal moment, one in which we can assert that the reality of the world is uncertain—not only with regard to its future, but intrinsically so. By this I mean that the voice of science itself would, in turn, confirm this constitutive uncertainty, in which reality unfolds through the coexistence of profoundly contradictory states within physical discontinuity.
A reality full of uncertainty.
Consequently, my work can only be laden with doubt and ambiguity. It invokes these unresolved oscillations, these minute variations that inhabit our hearts from day to day, ceaselessly pulling us between darkness and light. My images inhabit and question precisely this interstice, this tension between two poles, which I believe it is essential to preserve.
Through painting, I attempt to cast a poetic light on a new way of inhabiting the world—one that acknowledges its instability and its fundamental randomness, allowing an open and evolving form of thought to emerge from it. A thought that aspires to a complete acceptance of mystery,* embracing it fully through a practice grounded in a profound dialectic: the only breach capable of undoing reductive, simplistic and dangerous dualism.
A dialectic rooted in a pictorial poetics of water and its fluidity.
My technique is aqueous, humid. It attempts to immerse itself in an imagination of matter which, ultimately, seeks to touch upon a moral imagination. An imagination capable of safeguarding a logic powerful enough to revive us, to awaken us anew, allowing us once again to experience our intimate lives within the density of a present they can help reshape. An imagination that places us at a margin where the function of the unreal may seduce or unsettle, but always awakens the being lulled to sleep by habit.
A margin that might be called an experience of thresholds.
I consider my images as places through which I summon—invoke—those “little gods of the threshold,” as Gaston Bachelard called them, and where we experience ourselves as wakeful sleepers, lucid dreamers.
Meditating upon a material such as water cultivates an open imagination, for it plunges us into a double movement: on the one hand, a deepening—it is unfathomable, it is mystery—and on the other, an ascent—it is an inexhaustible force.
Water is primordial. It belongs to our fundamental images. It is a true psychic element, an element that gathers images in our dreams as in our thoughts, an element that reigns in our conscious as well as our unconscious; a substance both within and outside us, a reality and a force.
The water I seek to convey is the water that, when it emerges, tells us something about our own emergence. It has always seemed to me the most intimate mirror through which to explore the soul, because it gives tangible form to the ambivalence that lives at the heart of humankind—its unresolved dialectic, its living tension. What characterises water is its fall, and to work with it is an attempt to lessen that fall.
More than any other element, water is tinged with melancholy, for it knows sorrow. It embodies an experience of the world that is never entirely reconciled; it speaks of a wounded gentleness.
And yet its breath is never extinguished. Despite every contingency, it can never be separated from an awareness of fundamental dynamism. Elementally, it is liquid, and its substance gives rise to a particular kind of intimacy, an essential destiny that ceaselessly metamorphoses the substance of being.
For this reason, my images retain something unfinished within them. They continually attempt to remain upon this threshold of indeterminacy, at a precise point of vibration where they seek to make visible the persistence of water, taking on the suppleness of the wild creature in order to sustain a tension, a suspension, a breath—held back, yet still present.
Images caught in the act of coming to a halt—Stillstand—a sudden arrest between two movements, in “an immobile pause, yet one charged simultaneously with memory and dynamic energy.”**
My images attempt to bring forth something akin to tingling: a sensation somewhere between trembling and numbness, like retinal afterimages.
Flows of desire escaping; a memory that is also affect, an energy capable of unsettling the body.
To anchor oneself through ink.
* Theory developed in Guillaume Logé, Renaissance sauvage — l’art de l’Anthropocène.
** Walter Benjamin, Dialektik im Stillstand:
“It is not that the past casts its light upon the present, or the present its light upon the past, but rather that the image is that in which what has been comes together in a flash with the now (Jetzt) to form a single constellation. In other words: the image is dialectics at a standstill.”
*** Words attributed to Domenico, the renowned choreographer of the Quattrocento, in his treatise De arte saltandi et choreas ducendi, when discussing what he considered the most essential of the six fundamental elements of the art, which he called fantasmata.
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STILLSTAND
The reality of men is full of uncertainties, my work, therefore, is loaded with doubts and ambiguities. It summons these unresolved oscillations, these tiny variations that inhabit our heart daily and which constantly torn us between darkness and light.
My images stand and precisely question this interstice, this tension between two poles that i find essential to preserve.
This tension is also the one that plays out between drawing and painting, and that is why I prefer, to evoke my practice, to talk about inks.
When I seize a “pattern”, a “figure” - like the oyster, or the chrysalis -, this one has always two faces: the pattern itself, having been chosen with care, for the charge of ambivalence that it contains, and it is a prayer for me to repeat, in an ever-renewed way, this figure charged with inconstancy, while attempting to restore, to preserve, and to welcome in its heart the dialectic, within (among) these shapes with movin outlines (edges) and contents, in an the attempt to annihilate the reductive, simplistic and dangerous dualism.
The dialectic being the only breach (crack-opening) that I foresee for our coexistence.
Physically, my tool of thought is also my main working material: water.
I am in dialogue with it every day in the studio. When I make my large formats, I start by flooding my papers, and this first gestur will record a particular temporality, because I will only act (operate-proceed) in this humid time.
Water assigns me to my rightful place, guides me towards more humility, because I must not try to dominate it, nor to introduce a power relationship upon it, but rather an understanding. I have to accompany her, listen to her movements. It pushes me to make space in myself, to welcome what happens, and the joy that arises when it surprises me.
And when it finally settles on the paper, a reverie of impregnation plays out, because the ink does not crystallize on the surface of my paper, but penetrates its fibers like a dye, the paper drinks the liquid and they form a body together, they marry each other.
The ink dries and the image appears, and if the latter is convincing, it makes visible the survival of the water, it knows how to seize the flexibilit of the beast, to maintain a tension, a suspension, a breath held but still present.
The image is surprised in the act of its stop, - Stillstand *- , a sudden stop between two movements, such that it virtually contracts in its own internal tension the measure and the memory, in a motionless but charged pause all together memory and dynamic energy *.
My images are motionless, but try to bring out something similar to a tingling, a space between trembling and numbness, a retinal persistence.
Flows of escaping desires, a memory, which is affection, an energy capable of disturbing the body.
* Walter Benjamin, Dialektik im Stillstand “It is not that the past sheds its light on the present or the present its light on the past,
but the image is that in which what has been unites from one lightning stroke with the now (Jetzt) in a single constellation. In other words: the image is dialectical in the stop position.”
* Comment by Domenico, famous choreographer of the quattrocento, in his treatise Della Arte di ballare et danzare, when he dwells on the most essential of the six fundamental elements of art, in his view and which he calls, “fantasmata ” .