Toupie

In the beginning, there is not yet an image, but a presence searching for its form.
A field of color settles. Axes and tensions organize the space. Then comes the gesture: matter shifts, is erased, is traversed, sometimes disappears. A form appears, hesitates, transforms.

The spinning top is the starting point of this inquiry. It stays upright only by spinning. Its balance is never still: it turns its fall into stability.

From one painting to the next, it appears, disappears, returns in a different guise. It becomes movement, trace, sometimes a mere presence at the edge of the visible. What remains is the space it has disturbed.

Each painting thus seeks less to fix a form than to create the conditions for its appearance.

In this balance that must always be remade, in this way of holding steady at the very heart of what could topple us, something of our own condition perhaps surfaces.

The spinning top remains a physical and perceptual phenomenon. But through what it gives us to see and to feel, it perhaps touches on something of our humanity.

The book: 
Carnet d’Apparition I