“You who still believe in miracles, oh! if only you would seek this lost village! Remember: the farm and the arch of its barn bridge, the hedge under the lamp, the tall church. The inn’s staircase has a double flight, and beneath the windows there are two of those iron railings where dragons tie their horses on Sunday afternoons.”

If this sentence by Gustave Roud resonates so deeply with me, it is certainly because of the inverted mysticism it ignites—the hope tested by a promise of faith. I have noticed that I often find myself in front of the easel like a monk without doctrine, ready to pray prayers without words, without gods, without belief. To seek in the phenomena of nature the sublime, the beautiful, and the eternal. A painted bouquet proves not to be a vanity, not a memento mori, but a form of infinity without an beyond. I examine the world around me to find debris, which takes so many forms when it comes from immaterial inheritance. Forms that I struggled to take seriously in their innate symbolism, because their metaphor collapsed as soon as I approached them closely. The discomfort of trying to express through symbols in which I no longer have faith, and which crumble into words and paint, made art feel like a masquerade. But it took me time to understand that this came from the absence of the divine in me, the absence of belief. And that my paintings were not nostalgic witnesses or proposals for adaptation, but that I stood on the ridge between the two. The characters in the paintings are witnesses to the possibility of lingering, of observing and admiring the world even when it is emptied of meaning. It is as if a world without faith no longer has a center, yet it possesses traces of unshakable verticalities: beauty, cycles, care, painting itself. In a world of faith, everything exists for that faith, has its symbolism, finds valor in our gaze. But in the absence of belief, hierarchies collapse, and the meaning-empty world imposes itself upon us like a chaos without landmarks. That is why I paint. It is a consolation without promise—to paint a flower that one looks at attentively. It will mean nothing, remain silent, for that suffices, yet its silence will also testify to what its importance once was. The void and infinity are the serpent biting its own tail. Does not a world without faith present itself to us as a universe of beauty sufficient unto itself?

To turn these ideas into paintings creates porous compositions. The forms of emptiness I construct allow them to be traversed, explored, admired—where the spiritual once lived. Like an architect who considers the inhabitant, a musician imagining the dancer, or a writer serving the adventurer, the painter must create such a space.
The transition between an old world and a modern world, which we believed prematurely concluded, is not finished. It is the first time an era is marked by the future rather than the past. After the fall, before consolation. But through all this, I wish neither to believe nor to deconstruct. I want to inhabit the loss with intention and emotion.