Writing can produce something similar. While writing a poem, an image sometimes appears that did not exist before the words. I may be following a sentence, a rhythm, or an association, and suddenly I can see something. Not clearly enough to call it a composition, but with enough presence that I want to encounter it through painting.


SURFACESURFACE

Suspended in freefall.

The cool morning breeze
becomes a radial wave
passing through her.

Far from the surface,
her faded skin draws tight.

The body multiplies,
fragments,
vanishes.

She grows young again in the abyss.

To think of the past,
to seek forgiveness,
an answer, a solution.

Nothing matters.

She keeps falling.

The surface draws closer.

How much time do we have
to repent?

There is no God she can find
in so little time.

She sees the surface.

A tree in flames
fades into the horizon.



In these moments, I find it difficult to say whether writing has generated the image or whether writing has simply allowed me to recognise something that was already there.



In these moments, I find it difficult to say whether writing has generated the image or whether writing has simply allowed me to recognise something that was already there.

Perhaps the distinction is not important.

What interests me is the movement between them.

Painting can generate writing. Writing can generate an image. A drawing can remain dormant until another painting gives it meaning. A finished painting can contain the beginning of one that does not yet exist.

The process is therefore less linear than I once imagined.

There is no clear sequence in which an idea is conceived, developed, and finally translated into a painting. If anything, the opposite often happens. I paint first and understand later. Or I write without knowing that I am approaching a painting. Or I see something without knowing why it has remained with me.

Only afterwards do some of these fragments begin to relate to one another.

This is perhaps why I hesitate when I am asked where a painting comes from.

I can describe certain decisions. I can reconstruct parts of the process. I can point to a drawing, a poem, another painting, an image, a body I observed. But none of these alone explains why a particular painting became necessary.

There is always a gap.
And perhaps that gap is important.

If I knew exactly what the painting was before beginning it, painting would become a way of executing something already resolved elsewhere. The canvas would only receive an idea that had already taken form.

But this is not how painting works for me.

The image changes when it enters painting.

A body that interested me because of its position begins to establish relations with the space around it. A colour modifies the distance between two forms. A figure that seemed central becomes secondary. An architectural element appears. Something disappears. What began as an image gradually becomes a configuration of forces that I could not have anticipated.

At some point, the origin is no longer sufficient to explain the painting.

The painting has begun to think on its own terms.

This also changes how I understand research.

Research does not happen before the work and then disappear when painting begins. It moves through the work. It passes from observation to drawing, from drawing to writing, from writing to painting, and from one painting to another.

Not everything survives these passages.
Something is always lost.
Something else appears.

Perhaps this is why I think of my practice less as a sequence of works and more as a field. Each work occupies a temporary position inside it. A painting can answer something raised by an earlier work while simultaneously producing a question that will only become visible much later.

The beginning and the end become difficult to separate.

When I finish a painting, I often stand in front of it trying to understand what happened. Not only whether it works as an image, but what has appeared through the process of making it.

Sometimes what I find there is precisely the reason to continue.

A spatial tension.
A body that no longer seems sufficient.
A colour that has begun to behave differently.
A relation that I want to push further.

The next painting may already be there, although I cannot see it yet.

So when does a painting begin?
Perhaps before I know that I am painting it.
Perhaps in the moment when something refuses to disappear.

A body seen for a few seconds. A drawing made on the underground. A sentence written without knowing where it is going. A problem left unresolved in another painting.

These things do not yet constitute a work.
But they create a tension.
And for me, painting often begins there.
Not with an answer.
Not even necessarily with a clear question.

But with the feeling that something has appeared and that I need to follow it.