ARTISTIC STATEMENT
“My art takes shape around what, in experience, precedes understanding. An inner state exists before we even know what it is. It moves through us and inscribes itself somewhere within, only sometimes to disappear again, without ever having found a language.
An inner necessity becomes form.
Everything I create begins long before I enter the studio. My work takes shape through experience, through the observation of living things, through what the body perceives and the movements of the psyche. A work cannot be separated from the experience that brings it into being, from the hand that gives it life, or from the place in which it takes form. Because La Forêt is never merely a forest. VOID is never empty. My Invisibles have never simply contented themselves with being invisible.
Each of my works begins with what I am, in relation to a landscape, a memory, a body, a light, an absence, a saturation. This saturation is constant. This is what you see. The overflow, which is not necessarily suffering.
It is an excess of presence. A surplus of existence. An overwhelming density of information, sensations, emotions and thoughts coexisting within the same space, at the same moment.
This inner necessity stirs with such force that, eventually, it has no choice but to become form.
I do not invent images.
I make them appear.
Matter is my first language. I cover, erase, lacerate, accumulate, remove. An image may disappear beneath another and return several months later, displaced by everything that has occurred in the meantime. I seek the form through which experience becomes perceptible. There is something in this process that eludes conscious thought: something appears before I know what it is I have found.
Abstraction allows me to give form to the complexities that inhabit me, to order them, to give them contours. Perhaps, in doing so, it offers another person a space in which their own contours might emerge.
In VOID, thousands of marks made with a Bic pen accumulate until they produce a density, a vibration, almost a material presence. The gesture repeats itself for hours. As the drawing transforms, my own state changes with it.
Repetition organises and regulates me.
The boundary between the work I produce and what the act of producing it does to me then becomes less distinct.
Photography, poetry and my mountain notebooks belong to this same enquiry. I observe reflections, masses, movements, the almost imperceptible transformations of a landscape. I know that looking is not a neutral act; what I perceive is traversed by what I am. The landscape acts upon the person looking at it; in turn, the person looking transforms the landscape through perception.
La Forêt is the territory in which these different dimensions converge. There, I construct a mythological narrative in which landscapes, bodies, sensations, experiences and psyches cease to belong to separate realms.
La Forêt is a real place, walked through, photographed, observed; it is also a psychic construction, a territory in which my inner experience and the external world become difficult to disentangle. I paint it, I write it, I move through it.
Through creating, I discovered that the work did not end with me. It continued to live in the encounter with another. This is where my enquiry began.
From my singular experience, something universal can emerge. My works reveal themselves by remaining as close as possible to my inner narratives. For me, they are complete only when they have succeeded in conveying not the image of my experience, but its essence, its DNA. As they emerge, they themselves become an experience. The work is both the site and the outcome of the enquiry.
Then the work offers itself to others. It is shared through the gaze and transformed through the experience of the person looking. Something stirs at the mere sight of it. An echo, perhaps. The form does not change. And yet each gaze continues to set it in motion. Without moving, it moves. Without making a sound, it resonates.
Within this experience, a third space emerges.
I see that it connects human beings at their most intimate. In this sense, my work is, and will forever remain, unfinished. Each work is a space for exploration, a way of remaining as close as possible to open questions that probably have no answers.
This process is infinite. I like to live alongside the infinite every day, through contact with these works. Finitude frightens me. The other expands this infinity.
Why do certain encounters transform us so profoundly? Why do certain things shift or awaken something within us? Why and how does an intimate, autonomous and singular experience become a shared one?
One day, the questions raised by my work became larger than the medium through which they had emerged. Philosophy had already accompanied me for many years. I then began studying clinical psychology, psychopathology, psychosomatics and transactional analysis.
Art is my first language. Clinical practice became another site of observation. In both, I am interested in processes: how a reality is constructed, how a relationship transforms, what passes from one singular experience to another.
My Bleues were the first to embody these intellectual and perceptual assemblages.
Art returns us to the visceral, to what we share; it is the connective tissue between human beings. Does art create “society”? Can art become a form of “care” between human beings? What happens when such a powerful bond comes into play? Why is it so powerful? I continue to search. Every answer displaces the question.
My text La Forêt begins with this sentence:
« Rien n’est vivant qui ne s’éprouve. »
I believe it encapsulates the origin of my enquiry today.”
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.
An inner necessity becomes form.
Everything I create begins long before I enter the studio. My work takes shape through experience, through the observation of living things, through what the body perceives and the movements of the psyche. A work cannot be separated from the experience that brings it into being, from the hand that gives it life, or from the place in which it takes form. Because La Forêt is never merely a forest. VOID is never empty. My Invisibles have never simply contented themselves with being invisible.
Each of my works begins with what I am, in relation to a landscape, a memory, a body, a light, an absence, a saturation. This saturation is constant. This is what you see. The overflow, which is not necessarily suffering.
It is an excess of presence. A surplus of existence. An overwhelming density of information, sensations, emotions and thoughts coexisting within the same space, at the same moment.
This inner necessity stirs with such force that, eventually, it has no choice but to become form.
I do not invent images.
I make them appear.
Matter is my first language. I cover, erase, lacerate, accumulate, remove. An image may disappear beneath another and return several months later, displaced by everything that has occurred in the meantime. I seek the form through which experience becomes perceptible. There is something in this process that eludes conscious thought: something appears before I know what it is I have found.
Abstraction allows me to give form to the complexities that inhabit me, to order them, to give them contours. Perhaps, in doing so, it offers another person a space in which their own contours might emerge.
In VOID, thousands of marks made with a Bic pen accumulate until they produce a density, a vibration, almost a material presence. The gesture repeats itself for hours. As the drawing transforms, my own state changes with it.
Repetition organises and regulates me.
The boundary between the work I produce and what the act of producing it does to me then becomes less distinct.
Photography, poetry and my mountain notebooks belong to this same enquiry. I observe reflections, masses, movements, the almost imperceptible transformations of a landscape. I know that looking is not a neutral act; what I perceive is traversed by what I am. The landscape acts upon the person looking at it; in turn, the person looking transforms the landscape through perception.
La Forêt is the territory in which these different dimensions converge. There, I construct a mythological narrative in which landscapes, bodies, sensations, experiences and psyches cease to belong to separate realms.
La Forêt is a real place, walked through, photographed, observed; it is also a psychic construction, a territory in which my inner experience and the external world become difficult to disentangle. I paint it, I write it, I move through it.
Through creating, I discovered that the work did not end with me. It continued to live in the encounter with another. This is where my enquiry began.
From my singular experience, something universal can emerge. My works reveal themselves by remaining as close as possible to my inner narratives. For me, they are complete only when they have succeeded in conveying not the image of my experience, but its essence, its DNA. As they emerge, they themselves become an experience. The work is both the site and the outcome of the enquiry.
Then the work offers itself to others. It is shared through the gaze and transformed through the experience of the person looking. Something stirs at the mere sight of it. An echo, perhaps. The form does not change. And yet each gaze continues to set it in motion. Without moving, it moves. Without making a sound, it resonates.
Within this experience, a third space emerges.
I see that it connects human beings at their most intimate. In this sense, my work is, and will forever remain, unfinished. Each work is a space for exploration, a way of remaining as close as possible to open questions that probably have no answers.
This process is infinite. I like to live alongside the infinite every day, through contact with these works. Finitude frightens me. The other expands this infinity.
Why do certain encounters transform us so profoundly? Why do certain things shift or awaken something within us? Why and how does an intimate, autonomous and singular experience become a shared one?
One day, the questions raised by my work became larger than the medium through which they had emerged. Philosophy had already accompanied me for many years. I then began studying clinical psychology, psychopathology, psychosomatics and transactional analysis.
Art is my first language. Clinical practice became another site of observation. In both, I am interested in processes: how a reality is constructed, how a relationship transforms, what passes from one singular experience to another.
My Bleues were the first to embody these intellectual and perceptual assemblages.
Art returns us to the visceral, to what we share; it is the connective tissue between human beings. Does art create “society”? Can art become a form of “care” between human beings? What happens when such a powerful bond comes into play? Why is it so powerful? I continue to search. Every answer displaces the question.
My text La Forêt begins with this sentence:
« Rien n’est vivant qui ne s’éprouve. »
I believe it encapsulates the origin of my enquiry today.”
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.
