I was about eight or ten when I started to paint. During my early years, my way of imaging was purely figurative (my first “real” painting was the red fish in my mother’s aquarium). I was drawing constantly, from landscapes to caricatures, and horses to marines, recreating the world for myself with my pencil and my brush.
As the years went by, I realized that the need for drawing, painting, or photographing, relates to the desire, conscious or not, relevant or not, to identify with the subject. I also started to understand that light, color, and sound, exist in fact in themselves, intrinsically and independently from any conceptualization we may make of the forms they may embody. For instance, by abstracting the meanings from speech, or from laughters, the “naked” sound appears in its raw and full potentiality.
So I had found a way to venture outside of rational cognition, and it was for me a sort of awakening. It made me sense the immensity of the unknown, which I love, and realize that the realm of our perception, and therefore of our consciousness, is only limited to the boundaries we determine for ourselves.
This also led me to think that, as our voice articulates into intelligible languages, and as forms unfold from the determination of organic functions, emotions too, emerge from an underlying source that has the potential to generate all kinds of modulations. Emotions are shape-shifters in constant motion, that navigate the configurations of our interaction with the world.
This way of sensing the world very much defines my way of working today, where painting doesn’t come from meaning. Like light or sound, the paint and the canvas are devoid of significance, yet they too are pure potentiality. In that sense, painting here becomes a practice, a personal “way” or path, which eventually may or may not lead to referential meaning.
