I do not draw to silence the turmoil; I
draw to learn its rhythm.
For me, drawing has never been about producing
images. Rather, I seek to understand what
happens to me when several perceptions
surface almost simultaneously.
Lines and colours have never left me
in peace. They have come with an intensity that
always preceded my hand.
But this intensity is not uniform.
Some perceptions flash before my eyes
before I can even register them. Others
settle in slowly and gradually take up all the space.
What emerges abruptly may
disappear just as quickly; what seemed almost
imperceptible may linger for a long time.
I first take them in all at once.
Then I draw.
And little by little, what seemed to form a single
movement begins to break down.
A hue immediately catches my eye.
A shape takes longer to appear.
Elsewhere, a contrast strikes with force then
fades almost at once. Certain movements
linger long after I have perceived them.
I begin to distinguish between what happens quickly and what
happens strongly.
They are not the same thing.
Something can be immediate without being
powerful. Elsewhere, what seemed almost absent
ends up filling my entire field of vision.
I try to understand these differences.
I move a colour, I wait, I erase a
line, I draw another.
Every gesture becomes a way of observing what
has just happened.
I slow down what has passed through me too quickly to
be able to observe it. I let what requires
more time linger. Sometimes, I redraw a line
because something escaped me the
first time.
I dissect.
The speed.
The force.
The duration.
What emerges.
What persists.
What disappears.
I measure nothing. There is neither unit nor scale. Yet my
body recognises the differences.
Sometimes, something passes through me like a
shock. At other times, a perception takes hold so
slowly that I do not know exactly when
it began. A hue lingers in my
gaze. A sound fades almost immediately, but
its passage continues to have an effect.
So my hand seeks a different response
for each one.
The movement speeds up, then slows down until it almost
comes to a halt. The pressure of the pencil changes. My
breath sometimes follows these variations, sometimes not.
I am not trying to reproduce what I perceive.
I am trying to understand how it happens.
Jeff Buckley sings ‘Hallelujah’. The sound passes through me
in a different way to the whiteness of the sky. A shape
immediately catches my eye, whilst a
hue only reveals its intensity after a few
seconds. An emotion can be very strong and
yet move slowly.
These perceptions can occur
almost simultaneously.
But they do not travel at the same speed.
This is what drawing allows me to observe.
What seemed compact to me reveals its
differences. The tumult is not a mass. It is
made up of perceptions that have neither the same intensity, nor the
same duration, nor the same speed.
I no longer seek to make them move forward together.
I seek to recognise the way
in which they appear.
What passes through.
That which remains.
That which strikes.
That which returns slowly.
Drawing allows me to look for longer at
what my body has sometimes perceived in a fraction
of a second.
I then realise that the turmoil has never had
a single pace.
What I used to perceive as a whole contains
discrepancies, accelerations, lingering moments.
I no longer try to silence it.
I am learning to distinguish its movements.
