I don’t collect memories; I
preserve presences.
Colours, textures, smells and materials never quite disappear.
They remain within me like plants
pressed and dried in a herbarium.
The drawing does not invent them. It offers them a
place where they can come to life again.
A cold shower, a yellow drink, then
the drawing.
The transition is almost imperceptible.
One colour is enough.
I open a pink one; a few sparkles
appear – a candy-pink.
I’ve never liked sweets for their
taste. I chose them for their colour, their
transparency, their shiny coating, the way
they caught the light.
I could look at them for ages. Eating them
added nothing. Just seeing them was enough.
My mother loved sweets. She seemed to be
searching for their taste. I was searching for the
colours.
We were looking at the same object. We didn’t take away the same thing from it.
Years later, I don’t need to think about the sweets. The colour pink brings them back.
Not a scene. Not a date.
A transparency. A radiance. Skin
taut in the light.
They do not ask to be held onto.
They remain.
A colour calls to them. They return.
The pink I open today is not the same
as that of my childhood. Yet something
passes from one to the other.
The old sensation does not return intact.
It meets today’s sensation.
It is in this encounter that the
drawing begins.
Each sheet releases a presence, a
scent, a temperature, a texture, a
light.
I am not drawing the sweet.
I am not drawing childhood.
I am drawing with what they have left behind.
My drawings do not tell the story of a life; they
preserve the sensations that passed through it.
A colour applied today contains
several moments in time.
What has been seen.
What is seen.
And what appears between the two.
