The Door Ajar
Many people ask me why I paint.
To tell the truth, I have never deliberately searched for an answer.
For me, painting is neither a profession nor a means of making a living.
Painting came to me with the simplicity of things that need no explanation: grass growing, light shifting, morning entering through the window.
Artists are often expected to add explanations to their work, but I prefer to remain silent.
What appears on the canvas no longer belongs to me.
The moment another gaze rests upon it, the work becomes the site of a different resonance.
There, nothing needs to be proven.
No one needs to be defined, corrected, or judged.
Before a work of art, perhaps it is not the artist we encounter, but something of ourselves.
Art does not give answers.
It opens a space.
I often wonder: what kind of space do we still need today?
We live surrounded by measures, roles, and expectations.
Work evaluates us, the gaze of others assigns us a place,
and even our emotions seem expected to remain legible, controlled.
We pass through so many places,
and yet it has become rare to simply set down, for a moment,
what the world expects of us.
This is where this nomadic art space was born.
It no longer truly has an address.
It appears in the course of a pause, an encounter, a gaze.
No knowledge of art is needed to approach it.
Perhaps, for a moment,
it is enough to set aside what we believe we are supposed to be.
Color is enough.
Nothing to explain.
Nothing to justify.
The works ask nothing of us.
They correct nothing.
And in that moment, perhaps,
something of ourselves can simply be there.
As a child, people spoke of “gift.”
For a long time, I thought it was something one possessed,
a singular ability, almost a promise.
With time, I came to understand that perhaps it was the opposite:
not something we possess,
but something that inhabits us.
Each time I moved away from painting,
something within me fell silent.
And each time I returned to it,
I recovered a certain sense of presence.
Art never asked me to succeed.
It simply waited for me to return.
In constantly trying to meet what the world expects of us,
we may gradually, almost imperceptibly, drift away from ourselves.
We keep moving forward, continuing to play our part,
sometimes until we can no longer quite tell what within us has remained untouched.
I once thought I had to give this space a place of its own.
I have since come to understand that it cannot be enclosed or fixed to any one location.
I only need to stop trying to hold it somewhere:
then it comes into being wherever I am, unfolding with every step I take.
If a work speaks to you, write to me.