Research and Creation Journal

Preamble

I do not regard my works as finished. I stabilise them.

To stabilise is neither to interrupt nor to conclude. It is to maintain a dynamic balance between heterogeneous forces: matter, frequency, gaze, space. Stabilisation is an operational threshold: a point of tension coherent enough to be shared, yet still open to possibilities.

It stands in contrast to completion as a definitive closure. It aligns with the idea of the ‘open work’ (Umberto Eco), whilst shifting it towards a material and vibrational logic: the form holds because it still vibrates.

This journal accompanies this process. It does not explain the work. It maintains its internal dynamics.

I. Origin — Envelopment

Before any form, there is a sensory experience.

As a child, I was attentive to phenomena of envelopment: filtered light, underwater depth, diffuse propagation. It was not the figure that interested me, but the environment.

Envelopment is not passive immersion. It is a perceptual state in which boundaries become porous, where near and far are modulated by light and density.

This focus on the ‘environment’ aligns with phenomenological approaches to perception (Merleau-Ponty), where the visible is always interwoven with the body that perceives it.

The artwork arises from a relational field, not from an isolated object.

II. Matter — Surface as a condition

Painting remains central. Pigments, density, surface. The canvas is not a neutral medium. It acts as a receptive body. The surface conditions how the work appears.

This approach engages with modernist reflections on flatness (Greenberg), yet diverges from them by reintroducing the surface as an active space, akin to the questions surrounding the ‘cube’ and conditioning space developed in certain contemporary aesthetic inquiries.

The surface is not merely visible. It is structuring.

III. Voice — Resonance and formless matter

The voice is conceived as a plastic medium. A formless matter. It exists only in its propagation.

Resonance lies at the heart of this research. It is not a sonic effect. It is a relationship: a phenomenon in which one body causes another to vibrate. Jean-Luc Nancy conceives of listening as the opening up of meaning through vibration; Hartmut Rosa describes resonance as a transformative relationship with the world. These perspectives shed light on what I am exploring artistically: a work that is not content merely to be seen, but which resonates with the body.

Trained in opera singing, I have explored resonance as a physical, spatial and bodily phenomenon.

Integrated into the pictorial composition, the voice does not comment. It alters the state of perception. It activates a vibratory field in which the canvas becomes a membrane.

IV. Body and Activation — The Work as an Event

Certain works require an impulse. The viewer becomes the trigger. The work is not given once and for all.

It unfolds over time.

This approach is rooted in an understanding of the work as an event rather than as a stable object (drawing on ideas of performativity and relational aesthetics, notably in Bourriaud’s work, whilst maintaining a critical distance from any reduction to mere interaction).

Duration — three minutes — acts as a volumetric unit of time. A cube of time.

V. Stabilisation — Maintaining a tension

To stabilise means to hold together: matter, vibration, gaze, space.

Stabilisation is a critical decision. It consists of recognising that a state has attained sufficient density to be exhibited, whilst retaining its structural incompleteness.

Historically, modern and contemporary art has oscillated between two poles: formal autonomy (Greenberg) and the dematerialisation of the gesture (Lucy Lippard). The stabilisation I propose falls squarely within neither of these.

It claims neither the self-sufficient purity of the medium nor the disappearance of the object in favour of the concept. It affirms a third way: a materiality that is conscious of its conditions, yet open to vibrational events.

This gesture maintains the form in a productive tension. It rejects fixity without yielding to indeterminacy.

I pause. But I do not close the door.

VI. Opening — Ongoing Research

Each stabilisation opens up a new field.

- Expanded formats. - Site-specific colour explorations. - Work on spatial resonance.

The journal remains a space for thought in motion.