#1a & b
Throughout the year 2019
Various plant materials
15.5 × 11 × 0.3 cm
A simple sheet of cardboard becomes the stage for an organic experiment. Onto it are laid plant-based substances, chosen for their colouring power, which, once combined, open up an infinity of possibilities. These unions are never predetermined: they proliferate, shifting and unstable, as though animated by their own will. This vitality, this autonomous breath of matter, is the very reason for choosing such a fragile medium.
At the heart of my intention lies a gesture of letting go: to allow the work to come into being by itself, to grant it freedom of growth, and to intervene as little as possible. Such restraint pulls me away from my painter’s reflexes, unsettles my habits, and summons forms and hues I could never have foreseen within the comforting frame of familiar technique. My role is reduced to the preliminary stage: selecting the ingredients, sketching out a rudimentary composition. Then comes the moment of deposit: the “dish” is prepared, encased, hidden from light. There, in the secrecy of incubation, the substances stew, and the chemistry of life sets to work — they transform, they become.
After weeks, sometimes months, the work is lifted from its dormancy. The moment is always solemn: brought into the light, like the arrival of a newborn. This emergence is at once revelation and enigma. The work appears: is it accomplished, or must it be altered, infused with new ingredients, then returned to slumber to postpone its birth once more? So unfolds a cycle of waiting and reworking, alternating endlessly until the piece reaches a form deemed “sufficient.”
It becomes clear, then, how inadequate traditional paints — oil, acrylic — are to this spirit. Bound within their medium, rigid and predictable, they embody fixity and docility. Here, everything depends on flux, surprise, and the autonomy of matter. And yet the paradox returns: within this perpetual process, there must come a moment when evolution is halted, when appearance is frozen. What was an advantage — the painting’s heightened sensitivity — becomes a handicap. For how can one display an ultra-reactive work that oxidises in light and air, losing forever its first face?
The answer lies in photography. Not as a secondary substitute, but as the frozen witness of what would otherwise vanish. Too vulnerable to exist unmediated, the painting is presented through high-definition images, imperishable. Of course, the photograph will never be the painting itself. The open, vibrating alchemy of organic matter yields to the flatness of a photographic surface. But in return for this loss, something is gained: a new power of presentation, an incomparable scale of vision.
For the original borders on the miniature: only 15.5 × 11 cm. The human eye cannot grasp, within such confines, the infinitude of detail contained within. The photograph, however, unfolds them: offering a vertiginous immersion, a traversal of fibres and pigments with a precision beyond naked sight. Each image, captured in extreme resolution, reveals an unsuspected topography, an intimate cartography of matter. Thus, photography does not supplant painting; it rescues it, it petrifies it. It becomes what allows the work to endure, an instant solidified, prolonging the life of what would otherwise fade away.
In the end, the existence of this work is double, inseparable: the original painting and its photograph form a single organism, a symbiosis. Without the photograph, the painting dies. Without the painting, the photograph has no object. At its origin is the singular cuisine of organic ingredients, the fortuitous alchemy of the living. At its end is this paradoxical alliance — the living and its frozen double — which speaks of both fragility and strength within the same work.
K.L.
#2a & b
Throughout the year 2019
Various plant materials
15.5 × 11 × 0.3 cm
#3a & b
Throughout the year 2019
Various plant materials
15.5 × 11 × 0.3 cm
#4a & b
Throughout the year 2019
Various plant materials
15.5 × 11 × 0.3 cm
#11a & b
Throughout the year 2019
Various plant materials
15.5 × 11 × 0.3 cm