Frédéric Heurlier-Cimolai

Thinking Forms / Forms of Thinking

 Nourished by Renaissance aesthetics, American abstract painting, Italian primitives and the poetry of atomist philosophers, my work is made up of phases that follow one another and shape my trajectory.

I am first and foremost an artist who uses matter, colour, tools, canvas or paper to "express what cannot be expressed otherwise" (Merleau-Ponty).

In my work, forms must very quickly gain autonomy, a proper existence. Whether in drawing painting or in volume, it is the tension between the idea thought, drawn, implemented, and the slight or severe drifts that occur along the way that has long been at the heart of my work. 

One of my series, "Clinamen", was based on this notion described by Heraclitus, who says in essence that a thing is never itself but always becoming something other than what it is. 

A fundamentally abstract thought that describes the world. 

I like this paradox that feeds my approach. Each accident or appearance during my work can be a doorway, a passage to another thing, to an unexpected event rich in its very nature and which confers a discreet complexity to the simplicity of my forms. 

For me, abstraction is much more than non-representation, it is a universe of demands, a plunge into the very fundamentals of art. Here all that is at stake is a story of proportions and modulations of space and light, a search for balance.

This balance often arises unexpectedly, suddenly, in silence. This is what I am looking for, this moment when geometry becomes organic, when colour merges with matter and shapes. Everything then simply appears in its place, suddenly carrying the possibility of a thought.