The world as it appears to the human gaze is only one of many possible modes of vision. By denying the viewer the comfort of recognition, by unsettling the very logic of the image, abstraction breaks the selfish hierarchy of the gaze and reveals that a world shared by all beings is, a priori, impossible to depict. Detailed and meticulous representation, whether through photography, video, or realist painting, can show only the world as it is claimed by the human eye. It cannot move beyond that territory.

​​​​​​

Abstraction has the most natural connection to art, one that stretches across the entire history of humankind, from the darkness of prehistoric caves to the white cube, from painted mollusk shells to painted canvases. A single line, an almost invisible point, an abstract pattern with no counterpart in nature, became an inexhaustible spark of creation.

​​

In a world overflowing with information, caught in an endless stream of images, shaped by sporadic imagery and the liquid reality that surrounds us, it would be strange to chase a faithful copy of the world. For me, abstraction is the truer likeness of a reality that no longer holds still.

​​

What interests me in painting is not the depiction of feeling, but the possibility of evoking feeling without a plot. Abstract painting seems almost made for this emotional transmission, woven from feelings, impressions, and lived experience. It builds an invisible tactile bridge to the viewer, transmitting an emotional charge and drawing them into a process of empathic attunement.

​​

An abstract image demands precision, subtle perception, and attention to detail. Here, everything matters. Here, one cannot rely on mere recognition. Another logic is at work: a precise and individual attunement in which rhythm, color, form, scale, and a multitude of barely perceptible, almost accidental variables coalesce into a living system that, like a tender octopus, enfolds the viewer in its soft tentacles.

​​

Abstract painting does not allow the viewer to remain passive. Looking at an abstract canvas, the viewer is not limited to contemplation. Standing before it, they become an independent creative agent, generating meaning alongside the artist.

​​​

Once an abstract image enters the field of vision, it slips past national grammar and the need for translation. It asks for no interpreter. And yet it never promises that two people will arrive at the same place. Abstraction is the Tower of Babel before the divine curse descends.

​​

Abstraction is a practice of freedom. Freedom of action and freedom of interpretation, the freedom of the artist and the freedom of the viewer. Its history contains a protest against the rule of mimesis and against political control, and to this day it carries a spirit of emancipation.

 

I see a dictatorship at the heart of mimetic painting: the tyranny of reality itself. It subjects the body to disciplinary training in the service of resemblance, while abstraction disciplines the imagination. This logic is much closer to me than the phantom resemblance of an image to reality.

​​

I do not want a painting to begin with exploitation. Abstraction allows me to move away from outdated patriarchal structures and from the consumption of another person as artistic material. In the art world, the practice of posing can open the way to the exploitation of another person’s body and time for the sake of making a painting, while the old patriarchal bond between artist and muse merely legitimizes cultural vampirism.

​​

At the edge of the tangible, between speaking and muttering, in the constant flicker of blindness and illumination, at once a child’s scribble and a spiritual conduit, abstraction throws the viewer into the unknown. By bringing together divergent and seemingly incompatible elements, it forms new meanings and a new order.

​

​