Décharges [Dumping grounds]
Of all the arts, painting is undoubtedly the only one that necessarily, "hysterically," integrates its own catastrophe, and consequently is constituted as a flight in advance. In the other arts, the catastrophe is only associated. But painters pass through the catastrophe themselves, embrace the chaos, and attempt to emerge from it.
- Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, Bloomsbury Academic, 2003, pages 102-103
Each work from the Décharges series starts with a drawing sculpted in a stencil: fragments of buildings and dilapidated skyscrapers that surprise by their symmetry, the inversion of their façades. On these temporarily masked off areas, splashes of colors are thrown that damage and alter the surface of the vertically placed canvas. With brute momentum, and at a distance, these Décharges – shots of colourful liquid fired on the canvas – beat down on the drawn lines to nudge them into the sphere of painting; they are an off-hand, unrestrained action, in which the boundary between what is finished and what is unfinished becomes harder to sustain.
Through its apparent simplicity, this project attempts to distance itself from the act of painting. In fact, this entire series constitutes a digression around the idea of a system that simultaneously seeks control and lack thereof, one that confronts matter and form, that rethinks frontality and depth; a system that negates the horizon and the sky, while still preserving their light. With this powerful flood of matter, I ward off the tameness in my work, and prolong my reflection on space, isolation and the fragmentary form. In these depictions of spaces both crowded and desolate, the spectator is made conscious of how the structure of each landscape stems from our various choices.
- Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, Bloomsbury Academic, 2003, pages 102-103
Each work from the Décharges series starts with a drawing sculpted in a stencil: fragments of buildings and dilapidated skyscrapers that surprise by their symmetry, the inversion of their façades. On these temporarily masked off areas, splashes of colors are thrown that damage and alter the surface of the vertically placed canvas. With brute momentum, and at a distance, these Décharges – shots of colourful liquid fired on the canvas – beat down on the drawn lines to nudge them into the sphere of painting; they are an off-hand, unrestrained action, in which the boundary between what is finished and what is unfinished becomes harder to sustain.
Through its apparent simplicity, this project attempts to distance itself from the act of painting. In fact, this entire series constitutes a digression around the idea of a system that simultaneously seeks control and lack thereof, one that confronts matter and form, that rethinks frontality and depth; a system that negates the horizon and the sky, while still preserving their light. With this powerful flood of matter, I ward off the tameness in my work, and prolong my reflection on space, isolation and the fragmentary form. In these depictions of spaces both crowded and desolate, the spectator is made conscious of how the structure of each landscape stems from our various choices.
