Un Battement Per Minute I

About the artist

“My art takes shape around what, in experience, precedes understanding. An inner state exists before we even know what it is. It moves through us and inscribes itself somewhere within, only sometimes to disappear again, without ever having found a language. An inner necessity becomes form.

Everything I create begins long before I enter the studio. My work takes shape through experience, through the observation of living things, through what the body perceives and the movements of the psyche. A work cannot be separated from the experience that brings it into being, from the hand that gives it life, or from the place in which it takes form. Because La Forêt is never merely a forest. VOID is never empty. My Invisibles have never simply contented themselves with being invisible.

Each of my works begins with what I am, in relation to a landscape, a memory, a body, a light, an absence, a saturation. This saturation is constant. This is what you see. The overflow, which is not necessarily suffering. It is an excess of presence. A surplus of existence. An overwhelming density of information, sensations, emotions and thoughts coexisting within the same space, at the same moment. This inner necessity stirs with such force that, eventually, it has no choice but to become form.

I do not invent images. I make them appear. Matter is my first language. I cover, erase, lacerate, accumulate, remove. An image may disappear beneath another and return several months later, displaced by everything that has occurred in the meantime. I seek the form through which experience becomes perceptible. There is something in this process that eludes conscious thought: something appears before I know what it is I have found. 

Abstraction allows me to give form to the complexities that inhabit me, to order them, to give them contours. Perhaps, in doing so, it offers another person a space in which their own contours might emerge.
In VOID, thousands of marks made with a Bic pen accumulate until they produce a density, a vibration, almost a material presence. The gesture repeats itself for hours. As the drawing transforms, my own state changes with it.

Repetition organises and regulates me.
The boundary between the work I produce and what the act of producing it does to me then becomes less distinct. Photography, poetry and my mountain notebooks belong to this same enquiry. I observe reflections, masses, movements, the almost imperceptible transformations of a landscape. I know that looking is not a neutral act; what I perceive is traversed by what I am. The landscape acts upon the person looking at it; in turn, the person looking transforms the landscape through perception.

My text La Forêt begins with this sentence: « Rien n’est vivant qui ne s’éprouve. »
I believe it encapsulates the origin of my enquiry today.”

A.