The Many Faces of a Piece of Cardboard

A sheet of cardboard serves as the base for experimenting with organic substances. Using exclusively plant-based ingredients with strong colour potential, the process involves countless, unimaginable combinations—possibilities further enhanced by the living, unstable nature of the ingredients themselves. This variable of movement and vitality is the primary reason for choosing this medium. And this is the core of my intention: to allow the work to create itself, to foster its free development, and to intervene only minimally. This approach frees me from my habitual creative reflexes, yielding unexpected results that could never have emerged within the confines of the technical familiarities I usually rely on. Here, I intervene only at the outset, by selecting the ingredients I wish to see interact and by sketching a rough composition. Once the “dish” is prepared, it is enclosed and placed in an incubator, shielded from light, so the chemistry of the ingredients can simmer; so that, quite simply, it may become. After weeks—or even months—of maturation, the work is brought out of its gestational rest for a first evaluation. A profoundly stimulating moment, akin to a birth: this delivery arises from mystery and revelation. And then comes the surprise: is it “flavourful”? Or does it still need a hint of one ingredient or another, to be sent back into its developmental slumber and have its emergence delayed? This alternation between reworking and resting continues until the result is deemed satisfactory. It becomes clear, then, that traditional paints—like acrylic or oil, which are persistent amalgams of pigments petrified in a binder, predictable, rigid, and overly obedient—are ill-suited to the dynamic, autonomous, and unexpected spirit of this work. Yet once the appearance of a painting has been validated at a given point in its ever-evolving process, it must somehow be frozen, to halt its constant renewal. From that moment, the advantages of a living painting become a serious drawback when it comes to exhibition: how can one display an ultra-sensitive painting that will inevitably oxidise in air and light, and whose appearance will be irreversibly altered? The solution is to never exhibit the painting itself, but to present a fixed, unalterable version of it in the form of a high-definition photograph. The major drawback of a photograph—especially for a visual artist—is that it will never be what it depicts. The unique, open-air alchemy of organic ingredients is replaced by the materiality of the photographic medium. This procedural exchange might seem unbalanced were it not for a favourable trade-off: bringing to the photographed painting a presentation of incomparable quality—something impossible to achieve through simply exhibiting the “original” painting. I should note that each painting measures just 15.5 x 11 cm, verging on miniature. What is therefore presented is a photograph showing a vastly enlarged and vertiginously detailed version of the painting, offering an unparalleled level of immersion (for context, a single photo of a painting weighs 50GB and has a resolution of 4800dpi). Without technological tools, such a magnified view would remain entirely inaccessible to any viewer observing the “original”. Even if what is ultimately exhibited is a photograph, it is not the centrepiece. The essential element is what is being photographed. The photograph is the means of solidifying the painting—a kind of petrified snapshot. In short, the existence of this work stems from a binary relationship: the “original” painting cannot be separated from its photograph. Without the photograph, the painting dies. At the heart of this work lies the unique cooking process and the serendipitous alchemy of living ingredients—and, more precisely, the unfettered flow of the life force itself.