“to be lost in the woods …” Angèle Verret

A patient gesture, a constant re-beginning, a simple gesture. To draw a line a thousand times, ten thousand times…, so often that it finally appears transformed. To draw lightly or aggressively, by scraping, by rubbing, by striking. To drown it in the liquidity of paint, to see it disappear and reappear, to place it over, beside, around, to replace it, to make it longer, to allow it to fall again and again…

The construction of surfaces which are as fragile and dense as interruptions, the canvasses made of matter which is as thin as that of a landscape which sees itself in a reflection on water, suspended within the image, as transparency within the medium of paint, …just to see …once again…

This group of nearly-nothings, with neither edges nor centre, nor hierarchy of surface, this layering of changing intentions and vagueries of process, propose a palimpsest of overlapped time. There are many moments of painting at the heart of each, gestures which cross paths, separate, complete themselves or becoming lost, occasionally are forgotten. It in such a spirit that the present group of works took form. I returned, as is my wont, to certain aspects of my practice to rework them and found myself in a different position to that which I had originally thought. Marguerite Duras who, describing her desire to translate the humitiy of the park, and finally remembering it the next day, writes in her notebook: "the humidities of the park". I like to think that the unforeseen can nourish awareness and understanding, that it can be our loss as well as our arrival. Coming into being despite all that we can do, it often appears as a certain compression of time, space, desire… Thus, I’m more interested in the edges of the image than in the image itself and I search for the conditions allowing its appearance.

that which is said in silences, that which is seen in absences, is to work on the becoming…, doing resists both that which is to be done, and the consciousness to recognize it…
(Ruminations, A.Verret)

All my research is in this suspension; this light is my place; through gesture I learn to see and more precisely, to understand the world, this singularly difficult notion to name, to define, this thing which flees, which evaporates, which is hidden, melts, is lost… In such a place, my image awaits...