ARTISTIC STATEMENT
My work begins with what, in experience, precedes understanding.
An inner state exists before we know what it is. It moves through us, inscribes itself somewhere within us, sometimes disappears again without ever having found a language.
An inner necessity becomes form.
Everything I create begins long before I enter the studio. Through experience. Through the observation of the living. Through what my body perceives, what moves within my psyche, what a landscape does to me.
La Forêt is never merely a forest.
VOID is never empty.
My Invisibles have never been content with being invisible.
I work from saturation. An excess of presence. A surplus of existence. Information, sensations, emotions and thoughts coexisting within the same space, at the same moment.
Eventually, it has no choice but to become form.
My work carries something of my whole interiority, my perception, my questions, my contradictions. My body is there too. There is a real physical intensity to my artworks.
I do not invent images.
I make them appear.
I cover, erase, lacerate, accumulate, remove. I apply layers and layers and layers. I repeat gestures, marks, movements. An image disappears beneath another and sometimes returns months later, displaced by everything that has happened in between.
I seek the form in which experience becomes perceptible.
Repetition allows me to descend into what I perceive. It allows me to make the interiority of things appear, to make their density materialize. Something emerges before I know what I have found.
The more I repeat, the safer I feel. The calmer I become. The deeper I can descend into this “thing” I want to give form to.
It is repetition and time that create this fusion between me and my artwork. The more I repeat, the more human, the more alive the artwork becomes. As if the artwork were absorbing my intensities and keeping them locked inside itself.
Repetition organises me. It regulates me. The more regulated I become, the more the artwork fills with my intensity.
My vision is fragmented. An artist is, first and foremost, a way of seeing. Where someone sees a landscape, I see patterns. Details. Fragments. Repetitions. I observe the living world and what it repeats. Painting, drawing, photography and writing belong to this same enquiry. I observe masses, movements, light, reflections, the almost imperceptible transformations of landscapes. Looking is never neutral. What I perceive is traversed by what I am.
The Same — or the impossibility of the Same? Why does the word “Same” even exist?
A tree. Thousands of trees. A forest.
A cell. Thousands of cells. A living being.
A mark. Thousands of marks. A VOID drawing.
Repetition makes something else appear.
La Forêt is where all dimensions can converge.
A year ago, I began building La Forêt as a mythological narrative. It is a real territory as well as a psychic territory. I bring into it what I live, what I observe, and what affects me, until the boundaries between outer and inner landscapes become porous.
The forest doesn't move. Not like the ocean. The trees are grounded, they stay where they are. And yet, everything is very, very much alive. The light, the colours, the sounds, the scents are never the same, and I like to think that I can actually feel the trees talking to each other.
In the forest, what happens underground influences what happens above ground, and vice versa. What is invisible acts upon what is visible. Just like the unconscious and the conscious mind. What happens beneath the surface shapes what appears above it, and both are constantly influencing each other.
I paint it. I photograph it. I write it. I move through it.
Every day it's different, and yet it's still the same forest. She is there. She stays.
I think that's what I keep coming back to. The permanence of a place where everything is alive and constantly changing.
Through creating, I discovered that the work did not end with me. It continued in the person looking at it. Something intimate and singular could become shared without becoming the same.
All those repetitions, all those strokes, all that time, can have a hypnotic effect on the viewer. The same effect repetition has on me when I create. Except that I made it happen. I hypnotised myself.
Through the work, two singular experiences meet. Something new emerges.
The work remains physically unchanged, yet every gaze sets it in motion again.
This is where my enquiry into human beings enters my work.
For six years, alongside my artistic practice, I studied psychoanalysis, Transactional Analysis and psychopathology. I wanted to understand what happens inside us. How we construct reality. How relationships transform us. How one singular experience can reach another.
I still do.
Art is my first language.
I want to understand why certain encounters transform us. Why certain forms awaken something visceral within us. How an intimate experience becomes shared. Whether art can create a form of connection between human beings that exists before explanation.
I search. Every answer displaces the question.
My text La Forêt begins with this sentence:
« Rien n’est vivant qui ne s’éprouve. »
Perhaps that is where my work begins too.
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 state exists before we know what it is. It moves through us, inscribes itself somewhere within us, sometimes disappears again without ever having found a language.
An inner necessity becomes form.
Everything I create begins long before I enter the studio. Through experience. Through the observation of the living. Through what my body perceives, what moves within my psyche, what a landscape does to me.
La Forêt is never merely a forest.
VOID is never empty.
My Invisibles have never been content with being invisible.
I work from saturation. An excess of presence. A surplus of existence. Information, sensations, emotions and thoughts coexisting within the same space, at the same moment.
Eventually, it has no choice but to become form.
My work carries something of my whole interiority, my perception, my questions, my contradictions. My body is there too. There is a real physical intensity to my artworks.
I do not invent images.
I make them appear.
I cover, erase, lacerate, accumulate, remove. I apply layers and layers and layers. I repeat gestures, marks, movements. An image disappears beneath another and sometimes returns months later, displaced by everything that has happened in between.
I seek the form in which experience becomes perceptible.
Repetition allows me to descend into what I perceive. It allows me to make the interiority of things appear, to make their density materialize. Something emerges before I know what I have found.
The more I repeat, the safer I feel. The calmer I become. The deeper I can descend into this “thing” I want to give form to.
It is repetition and time that create this fusion between me and my artwork. The more I repeat, the more human, the more alive the artwork becomes. As if the artwork were absorbing my intensities and keeping them locked inside itself.
Repetition organises me. It regulates me. The more regulated I become, the more the artwork fills with my intensity.
My vision is fragmented. An artist is, first and foremost, a way of seeing. Where someone sees a landscape, I see patterns. Details. Fragments. Repetitions. I observe the living world and what it repeats. Painting, drawing, photography and writing belong to this same enquiry. I observe masses, movements, light, reflections, the almost imperceptible transformations of landscapes. Looking is never neutral. What I perceive is traversed by what I am.
The Same — or the impossibility of the Same? Why does the word “Same” even exist?
A tree. Thousands of trees. A forest.
A cell. Thousands of cells. A living being.
A mark. Thousands of marks. A VOID drawing.
Repetition makes something else appear.
La Forêt is where all dimensions can converge.
A year ago, I began building La Forêt as a mythological narrative. It is a real territory as well as a psychic territory. I bring into it what I live, what I observe, and what affects me, until the boundaries between outer and inner landscapes become porous.
The forest doesn't move. Not like the ocean. The trees are grounded, they stay where they are. And yet, everything is very, very much alive. The light, the colours, the sounds, the scents are never the same, and I like to think that I can actually feel the trees talking to each other.
In the forest, what happens underground influences what happens above ground, and vice versa. What is invisible acts upon what is visible. Just like the unconscious and the conscious mind. What happens beneath the surface shapes what appears above it, and both are constantly influencing each other.
I paint it. I photograph it. I write it. I move through it.
Every day it's different, and yet it's still the same forest. She is there. She stays.
I think that's what I keep coming back to. The permanence of a place where everything is alive and constantly changing.
Through creating, I discovered that the work did not end with me. It continued in the person looking at it. Something intimate and singular could become shared without becoming the same.
All those repetitions, all those strokes, all that time, can have a hypnotic effect on the viewer. The same effect repetition has on me when I create. Except that I made it happen. I hypnotised myself.
Through the work, two singular experiences meet. Something new emerges.
The work remains physically unchanged, yet every gaze sets it in motion again.
This is where my enquiry into human beings enters my work.
For six years, alongside my artistic practice, I studied psychoanalysis, Transactional Analysis and psychopathology. I wanted to understand what happens inside us. How we construct reality. How relationships transform us. How one singular experience can reach another.
I still do.
Art is my first language.
I want to understand why certain encounters transform us. Why certain forms awaken something visceral within us. How an intimate experience becomes shared. Whether art can create a form of connection between human beings that exists before explanation.
I search. Every answer displaces the question.
My text La Forêt begins with this sentence:
« Rien n’est vivant qui ne s’éprouve. »
Perhaps that is where my work begins too.
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.
