ARTISTIC STATEMENT
“I approach painting and drawing as one explores a territory — moving through matter, gesture, perceptual tension and the uncertainty of what may emerge.
My practice forms an ecosystem of thought and creation where writing, painting, sensory experience and the observation of life continuously interact.
The work begins long before the studio. For extended periods, forms develop elsewhere: through observation, lived experience, perceptual saturation and the silent accumulation of inner movements that slowly organize themselves within the mind and body. The studio becomes the place where these tensions are allowed to surface and acquire a material presence.
I give them the right to exist.
I allow images to appear.
Drawing and painting emerge from the same movement: tracing, layering, erasing, returning, repeating, excavating the surface until something begins to reveal itself.
Repetition functions as a form of regulation — a way of structuring sensory intensity, organizing perceptual overflow and translating cognitive density into visual form.
Matter is my first language.
Matter is memory deposited onto the surface.
Pigments, blacks, blues, charcoal dust and successive layers generate immersive structures where light, instability and saturation coexist. Obsessive gestures, accumulations, fragmentations and visual overstimulation create fields of tension in which perception itself becomes active material. The work seeks to render perceptible the invisible circulations that move through nervous systems, memory and psychic space.
My works can be understood as perceptual events.
Materializations of psychic states.
Interior landscapes shaped by tension, silence, saturation and instability.
A mythological inner traversal of the living.
I am drawn toward thresholds of consciousness — those fragile moments when thought hesitates, when emotion forms before language, when perception oscillates between emergence and dissolution. Drawing and painting become surfaces through which these unstable movements can inscribe themselves and become shareable experiences.
This research exists in dialogue with my interest in psychoanalysis, psychology, neuroscience and contemporary studies of perception and the brain. These fields nourish the work through questions surrounding image, consciousness and transformation: how does an image alter an inner state? How can visual vibration reshape perception, emotion or psychic presence within the viewer?
The artwork becomes a place of passage — a sensory and psychological space where fragments of memory, affect and perception settle into matter. The viewer is invited to move through these immersive environments and encounter their own zones of resonance.
This research currently unfolds through a body of work titled The Forest. Here the forest appears simultaneously as a physical, mental and perceptual territory: a dense living structure crossed by tensions, disorientation, sensory intensity and transformation. Painting and drawing become ways of moving through this space — opening passages, allowing uncertain forms, hidden presences and interior architectures to emerge.
Each work attempts to give presence to what already exists beneath language and beneath appearances.
To explore the inner human experience as a traversal.
One’s own.”
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“The universe according to Agathe Toman is a complex canvas moving so each invisible thread participates in its coherence thus guaranteeing an infinite multiplicity. Each thread allows when we touch it, to see and feel a particular harmony which is unknown, inimitable, unique. Creation is vibrating through an arpeggio of her expression; an encounter, a dream, a fleeting thought, an invented color, the skin that we barely touch, that we scrub, that we scratch, our skin, or the other’s, makes it echo and create symphonies that are perpetually new. You have to listen carefully. Discover futures, identities, and feelings that have no names or natures preceding them. Let yourself go. Become an echo room. Fight against the door that could shut before the intangible. Embrace, come out, welcome these emotions which are modulated from the brightest to the darkest. It is a discipline. A priesthood that the artist endorses. She listens to herself. She listens.A striped black, a white delight, are the notes that are specific to each person, to each thing, to each moment. That is what allows a big, thick, whole, rich and eternal truth. Her work is a synthesis of the inaudible to the invisible and from the invisible to the impalpable.” From The Invisibles – One Sacred - 2019. Original text in french written by Marie Arquié.
My practice forms an ecosystem of thought and creation where writing, painting, sensory experience and the observation of life continuously interact.
The work begins long before the studio. For extended periods, forms develop elsewhere: through observation, lived experience, perceptual saturation and the silent accumulation of inner movements that slowly organize themselves within the mind and body. The studio becomes the place where these tensions are allowed to surface and acquire a material presence.
I give them the right to exist.
I allow images to appear.
Drawing and painting emerge from the same movement: tracing, layering, erasing, returning, repeating, excavating the surface until something begins to reveal itself.
Repetition functions as a form of regulation — a way of structuring sensory intensity, organizing perceptual overflow and translating cognitive density into visual form.
Matter is my first language.
Matter is memory deposited onto the surface.
Pigments, blacks, blues, charcoal dust and successive layers generate immersive structures where light, instability and saturation coexist. Obsessive gestures, accumulations, fragmentations and visual overstimulation create fields of tension in which perception itself becomes active material. The work seeks to render perceptible the invisible circulations that move through nervous systems, memory and psychic space.
My works can be understood as perceptual events.
Materializations of psychic states.
Interior landscapes shaped by tension, silence, saturation and instability.
A mythological inner traversal of the living.
I am drawn toward thresholds of consciousness — those fragile moments when thought hesitates, when emotion forms before language, when perception oscillates between emergence and dissolution. Drawing and painting become surfaces through which these unstable movements can inscribe themselves and become shareable experiences.
This research exists in dialogue with my interest in psychoanalysis, psychology, neuroscience and contemporary studies of perception and the brain. These fields nourish the work through questions surrounding image, consciousness and transformation: how does an image alter an inner state? How can visual vibration reshape perception, emotion or psychic presence within the viewer?
The artwork becomes a place of passage — a sensory and psychological space where fragments of memory, affect and perception settle into matter. The viewer is invited to move through these immersive environments and encounter their own zones of resonance.
This research currently unfolds through a body of work titled The Forest. Here the forest appears simultaneously as a physical, mental and perceptual territory: a dense living structure crossed by tensions, disorientation, sensory intensity and transformation. Painting and drawing become ways of moving through this space — opening passages, allowing uncertain forms, hidden presences and interior architectures to emerge.
Each work attempts to give presence to what already exists beneath language and beneath appearances.
To explore the inner human experience as a traversal.
One’s own.”
“The universe according to Agathe Toman is a complex canvas moving so each invisible thread participates in its coherence thus guaranteeing an infinite multiplicity. Each thread allows when we touch it, to see and feel a particular harmony which is unknown, inimitable, unique. Creation is vibrating through an arpeggio of her expression; an encounter, a dream, a fleeting thought, an invented color, the skin that we barely touch, that we scrub, that we scratch, our skin, or the other’s, makes it echo and create symphonies that are perpetually new. You have to listen carefully. Discover futures, identities, and feelings that have no names or natures preceding them. Let yourself go. Become an echo room. Fight against the door that could shut before the intangible. Embrace, come out, welcome these emotions which are modulated from the brightest to the darkest. It is a discipline. A priesthood that the artist endorses. She listens to herself. She listens.A striped black, a white delight, are the notes that are specific to each person, to each thing, to each moment. That is what allows a big, thick, whole, rich and eternal truth. Her work is a synthesis of the inaudible to the invisible and from the invisible to the impalpable.” From The Invisibles – One Sacred - 2019. Original text in french written by Marie Arquié.
