Tristan Morlet

My pictorial practice takes place in an in-between, a sort of ambivalence between the need for rigor and the rage to paint.

An ambivalence that reveals both pictorial questions and more intimate questions.

The formal effort is experienced as going beyond oneself, a desire to give a meditative dimension: to translate the breath, the breathing and the exhalation, the flow and the re-flow, in a word the energy of life.

The painting session is really "a way out of oneself", almost a trance! And for those who watch a moment of contemplation which wants to be put on hold from the rest of the world.

When I paint, the main driving force is not to show but to do. My painting is a wandering, a walk refusing any premeditation, the stake being in the present of the image in the process of being born and of the observation of its metamorphoses in the constant dialogue between form and form, the thought and movement.

The painting takes place following the movement of the body, the canvas becomes a mental space, an arena where energies are deployed.

Colors and shapes are veiled, superimposed, overlapped, diluted or erased. The wrong gesture, or the awkward or inappropriate gesture calls for continuing, transforming, rectifying until finding the right point of balance, the right tensions.

So, the contrasts that we capture, the cold and the hot, the icy side and a certain sensuality are linked to me, not in an anecdotal way, but as human emotions, ambivalences of my personality. And it is precisely these tensions, this struggle almost, against ambivalences, against the explosion that make my research, a search for unity. The unity of the painting is for me an essential stake.

This quest for unity is the search for measure, measured gesture, simply good breathing ... I find fundamental the satisfaction of producing something with my hands, of touching the material.

Confronting matter is still learning to be in the world, to be attached to the entire universe, and above all, to feel deeply alive.