| In art one must be equipped to combat for life, not expressed in terms of combat with others or with the world, but rather like a returning to one’s place, to be one with oneself, to dwell and inhabit what one is. |  |
Vanessa Lamounier
In art one must be equipped to combat for life, not expressed in terms of combat with others or with the world, but rather like a returning to one’s place, to be one with oneself, to dwell and inhabit what one is. The process of making art is a lucid and precise act of knowing, as well as a pre-intellectual and intuitive mode of encounter. It is an act guided by the sense of anticipation of a discovery that will arrive just at the end, after the work is made.
Art calls for action and before action the imagination is at work. An act of the imagination operates here and now, and starts with the solitary intimations of a problem, of bits and pieces here and there which seem to offer clues to something hidden. It is the experience of making ever-new sense of the world by converting the impacts of reality into a comprehension of their meaning through the powers of the imagination.
In the case of my work, the process of making art presents itself as an exercise in which extreme attention to what is real is confronted with the practice that simultaneously respects this reality and transforms it. It transforms it not by destroying it, but by grasping it. As such the transformative play of reality presents itself like a discovery of a central incertitude, in which the subject, in its conversion to itself, is capable of the right action.
At the same time it is to take oneself as an object of a complex and difficult elaboration, involving risk and a constant struggle in finding that there is something altogether different behind things.
To understand where this force emerges is to grasp the place of confrontation which disturbs what was considered immobile and breaks down illusory defenses, allowing me to seek in sentiments, conscience, instincts, in elements of erotic feelings and objects of fantastic disclosures, enhanced by any accidents that might befall them, guided by the notions of the beautiful. It is when the idea of knowledge based on wholly identifiable grounds collapses and opens up a space for experimentation devoted to subversion, which creates danger in every area, and evokes beauty and sensuality as affirmative instincts for life. This specific attitude concerning ways of being and thinking is the means of true discourse that permit me to face up the real.
