Here are some short texts about creation, thoughts I caught while painting.
There are some more in french…

What does «right» mean for me?

I do not pretend there are right and wrong points in creation that I’d be able to high-light; this I leave for Manicheans... When it shows, this right configuration I’m looking for only does for me, and perhaps for somebody’s look with similar resonances. This right configuration is the trace of a fragile and ephemeral correspondence between what I feel, what I am aware of, and what I draw. When this alignment occurs, it is a silent detonation, a dazzling from within. It is exactly for this rare moment that I keep on creating.

To create?

The french dictionary Robert tells me (selection):
Origin: latin creare, to give being, existence, life to[…]; to pull out of nothingness.

Existence
What is, coming out of something else.
Ex-ist: to be, out of something, to be by differenciation with the origin.

While creating, the first gesture is oneself. Then shape and texture acquire their own lives.
There is no more «one», there are two. The one who creates, and the medium on which he creates. And since there are two, there is dialogue. This new being from something else, is it precisely this dialogue? Is it the artist, is it the work? Just all at once.
While it is obvious that the artist transforms the medium on which he works, much the work works him too. In my case, my painting is questioning me at every moment, asking me to take a position: am I doing right? Am I in the formal, the learned, in the decorous?
Beyond the physical trace on the paper, the internal trace left by this dialogue accompanies me.

To pull out of nothingness
In a religious sense: To make, to train

These words produce the greatest effect on me...
I can see the emptiness, the abyss, the abyss. I lean and I feel dizzy. Do we, artists, have this claim, to draw our pictures of our nothingness? Basically surely. I suppose that part of the joy that motivates us when we create is not feeling divine, but God creating... Or is it the opposite? Would'nt the religious imagery simply be an anthropomorphic construct, a transposition of the human experience, including that of creating?

 

Why, as artists, are we silent about our choices?

We cannot deny that there are a priori to create: principles, concepts on which we rely.
The scope of creation is so vast that we are always busy to restrict, confine it not to get lost. Otherwise, what could be the function of schools, movements, groups of artists and manifestoes?
We restrict ourselves to a few techniques, elements of formal representation, bias about our relationship to representation, ranges of tones and colors, lights, games of volume, space; we have our gestures and we love smoothing or sculpting, slashing or assembling; we involve our body, affect, or intellect; we speak of ourselves, society, art trade; we have established our relation to other media, such as writing, performance, sound; and we show or we hide ourselves, while often thinking we do the opposite.
In all cases we make choices. We never use in a single work, or even sometimes in a life the whole range of possibilities in the field of creation.
These choices we do not talk about. This time doesn't encourage us to do so.
There was other times, when artists gathered in movements brandished manifesoes; not today. As if to assert influence on the creation could jeopardize its legitimacy. So, unable to create without first making these choices, we do it in secret.