ARTISTIC STATEMENT
“I approach painting and drawing as one explores a territory — moving through matter, gesture, and the uncertainty of what may emerge. My practice forms an ecosystem of thought and creation where writing, painting, and the observation of life continuously interact.
The work does not begin in the studio. For a long time something takes shape elsewhere: in observation, in lived experience, in the inner movements that slowly settle within us. The studio is the place where this process finally finds a form.
I give it the right to exist.
I do not invent images.
I allow them to appear.
Drawing and painting arise from the same movement: tracing, layering, erasing, returning, digging into the surface until something begins to emerge.
Matter is my first language.
Matter is my memory, deposited onto the canvas.
Pigments, blacks, blues, charcoal dust and successive layers create a field of tension where light and darkness confront one another. This work of density and withdrawal seeks less to represent than to reveal — to make perceptible what circulates within us without always finding a form.
My works can be seen as materializations of psychic states.
Interior landscapes shaped by tensions and silences.
A mythological inner traversal of the living.
I am drawn to those moments when thought hesitates, when an emotion forms before it can be named. Drawing and painting become surfaces where these invisible movements can inscribe themselves.
This research exists in dialogue with my interest in psychoanalysis, psychology and contemporary studies of perception and the brain. These fields do not become theory within the work; rather they open questions: how does an image act upon consciousness? How can a visual vibration alter the inner state of the viewer?
In this process the artwork becomes a place of passage — a surface where fragments of memory and affect settle. The viewer is invited to move through this space and encounter their own zones of resonance.
This research currently unfolds through a body of work titled The Forest. Here the forest appears both as a physical and a mental territory: a dense, living space that one crosses without always knowing what one is looking for. Perhaps only to become other.
Painting and drawing become ways of advancing through this forest — opening passages, allowing uncertain forms to appear.
Each work is an attempt to allow what already exists to find its presence in the world.
To explore the inner human experience as a traversal.
One’s own.”
a.
“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.
The work does not begin in the studio. For a long time something takes shape elsewhere: in observation, in lived experience, in the inner movements that slowly settle within us. The studio is the place where this process finally finds a form.
I give it the right to exist.
I do not invent images.
I allow them to appear.
Drawing and painting arise from the same movement: tracing, layering, erasing, returning, digging into the surface until something begins to emerge.
Matter is my first language.
Matter is my memory, deposited onto the canvas.
Pigments, blacks, blues, charcoal dust and successive layers create a field of tension where light and darkness confront one another. This work of density and withdrawal seeks less to represent than to reveal — to make perceptible what circulates within us without always finding a form.
My works can be seen as materializations of psychic states.
Interior landscapes shaped by tensions and silences.
A mythological inner traversal of the living.
I am drawn to those moments when thought hesitates, when an emotion forms before it can be named. Drawing and painting become surfaces where these invisible movements can inscribe themselves.
This research exists in dialogue with my interest in psychoanalysis, psychology and contemporary studies of perception and the brain. These fields do not become theory within the work; rather they open questions: how does an image act upon consciousness? How can a visual vibration alter the inner state of the viewer?
In this process the artwork becomes a place of passage — a surface where fragments of memory and affect settle. The viewer is invited to move through this space and encounter their own zones of resonance.
This research currently unfolds through a body of work titled The Forest. Here the forest appears both as a physical and a mental territory: a dense, living space that one crosses without always knowing what one is looking for. Perhaps only to become other.
Painting and drawing become ways of advancing through this forest — opening passages, allowing uncertain forms to appear.
Each work is an attempt to allow what already exists to find its presence in the world.
To explore the inner human experience as a traversal.
One’s own.”
a.
“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.
