Physis — from the formless to form

A cosmogony of matter

Physis does not simply mean nature as it presents itself to the eye. The Greek word names what is born, grows, and unfolds from its own power. It contains the idea of an appearance: the passage from what remains hidden toward a form that becomes visible.

This collection belongs to that interval. It does not seek to reproduce nature as an already finished spectacle, but to approach its inner beginning: the moment when matter organises itself, when a presence emerges from indeterminacy, and when form, without yet being fixed, begins to insist.

Genesis: separating, naming, bringing forth

The first creation account in Genesis does not describe creation as the instantaneous manufacture of a world made of completed objects. It proceeds through successive distinctions. Light is separated from darkness, the waters above from the waters below, and the sea from dry land. God names, orders, and establishes relationships. The world becomes habitable because primordial indeterminacy receives boundaries, rhythms, and differences.

In the beginning, the earth is formless and empty, while a breath of God moves over the waters. This image does not present chaos as a power rival to the Creator. It evokes a reality that has not yet received its configuration. The first word—let there be light—does not destroy darkness: it distinguishes darkness from light and gives each its place. Biblical creation does not abolish the obscure depth from which forms emerge. It gives it order.

This thought is close to my experience of painting. A canvas never begins in nothingness. It already possesses a surface, resistance, light, and material memory. The gesture does not introduce a form entirely conceived elsewhere. It separates, connects, covers, and reveals. Little by little, something becomes visible.

The earth called to bring forth life

On the third day, God says: “Let the earth produce vegetation” (Genesis 1:11). The wording is decisive. God creates through his word, yet he calls the earth to bear life. The earth is neither divine nor autonomous; nor is it utterly passive matter. It receives fertility and becomes capable of producing according to the powers it has been given.

Life thus appears within a relationship: it proceeds from God’s creative initiative and, at the same time, genuinely germinates from the earth. This shared causality does not erase the difference between Creator and creation. On the contrary, it gives that difference its full depth. The world depends on God, but this dependence does not make it unreal. It grounds its own consistency.

The second creation account in Genesis returns to this proximity in a more intimate form. The human being is fashioned from the dust of the ground and then receives the breath of life. Adam comes from adamah, the earth. Body and breath are not two foreign realities but one living creature. Humanity does not stand before nature as an external spectator: it belongs to nature through its very matter.

In the third chapter, this relationship is wounded. The ground becomes the place of effort, resistance, and mortality. Yet it is not declared evil. What breaks is a harmony: between the human being and God, between desire and limit, between labour and fruit. Biblical nature therefore retains an ambiguity that seems essential to me: good in its origin and fertile in its power, it also bears the traces of finitude and rupture.

Job and the otherness of the world

In the book of Job, God does not answer suffering with a theory. He brings Job before the immensity of a world he has neither built nor measured: the foundations of the earth, the sea, the constellations, wild animals, and finally the unsettling figures of Behemoth and Leviathan.

This cosmogony reminds us that creation does not exist solely for human use. It possesses an amplitude, strangeness, and freedom that exceed our point of view. Reality cannot be reduced to what we can explain or employ. It retains a dimension that displaces us from the centre.

I encounter this otherness in painting when the material refuses the intended image. A run of paint, an opacity, or a superimposition may displace the whole composition. It would be easy to treat these events as accidents to be removed. Yet it is sometimes precisely there that the painting ceases to execute an intention and begins to possess its own necessity.

Physis: what appears and what withdraws

For Heraclitus, physis loves to hide. The phrase does not mean that nature conceals behind appearances a secret we might one day possess entirely. It suggests instead that every appearance retains a withdrawal. A form becomes visible, but the movement that produced it is not exhausted in that visibility.

A flower manifests an order without displaying all the exchanges, slowness, and tensions that made it possible. In the same way, the surface of a painting carries erased layers, covered gestures, and decisions that have become invisible. The finished image does not abolish its history; it keeps it in depth.

For Aristotle, physis is an internal principle of motion and rest. A natural being does not merely receive form from outside. It carries a potential that can become actual. The distinction between potentiality and actuality allows us to think of what has not yet been accomplished without confusing it with nothingness. Before appearing, form exists as a real possibility, an orientation, and a tension.

This idea describes part of my work with precision. The canvas does not contain a predetermined image waiting to be uncovered. It contains several possible becomings. Each gesture closes some and opens others. Painting consists less in imposing a figure than in discerning, among these possibilities, the one that begins to acquire coherence.

The time of creation

Augustine refuses to imagine creation as a divine act occurring within a time that preceded it: time itself belongs to the created world. He also develops the idea of seminal reasons, principles placed within creation and called to unfold according to their proper times. Without turning Augustine into a thinker of evolution in the modern sense, this intuition allows us to understand a created world that is not immobile. Creation has a history, and its forms may appear progressively.

Thomas Aquinas deepens the question by distinguishing the first cause from secondary causes. God gives being and the power to act, while creatures genuinely act according to their nature. To say that a plant grows through God’s action does not cancel the natural causes of its growth. Conversely, describing those causes does not render the Creator unnecessary. The two levels do not compete.

This distinction protects both divine transcendence and the reality of the world. Created matter can resist, produce, and change. Its dependence upon God is not a deprivation of existence; it is the condition of its capacity to act.

Between the finite and the infinite

Nicholas of Cusa insists that there is no proportion between the finite and the infinite. The creature cannot become the measure of God. Yet the finite world may allow us to sense what surpasses it precisely because it does not contain it. A limit does not necessarily close; it can become an opening.

This tension continues in the analogia entis as Erich Przywara understands it: between God and the creature there is likeness, yet the unlikeness remains always greater. Analogy neither confuses the two terms nor separates them absolutely. It sustains a rhythm between proximity and distance, presence and withdrawal.

This thought is important for Physis. Matter does not serve as a pretext for a supposedly higher reality. It remains fully material: density, colour, resistance, and light. Yet it can become the site of an opening. The visible is not the infinite, but it can carry a resonance that surpasses it.

La Morphogenèse

La Morphogenèse gives the collection its first figure. A luminous structure seems to emerge from a darker ground without allowing itself to be completely identified. It may evoke a flowering, an architecture, or an organism, but none of these readings exhausts it.

I wanted to preserve the instant when the eye perceives that an order is taking shape without yet being able to give it a final name. Form does not appear as an outline applied from outside. It is produced through relationships of colour, revisions, erasures, and the densities of matter.

The viewer continues this process. Before a partly indeterminate image, perception searches, compares, and completes. A figure appears, disappears, and returns differently. Morphogenesis thus continues in the gaze.

Analogia entis

Analogia entis shifts the question of formation toward the relation between the finite and what exceeds it. Its subtitle, Finiti ad infinitum nulla est proportio, recalls that there is no common measure between the finite and the infinite.

The painting does not try to resolve this distance. It allows it to act. Matter and light compose a tension between weight and elevation, determination and openness. Form remains limited, but it does not close upon itself. It becomes the site of an intimation rather than the illustration of a doctrine.

From non-form to form

Through Physis, I am not trying to demonstrate a cosmology or translate a theological text into images. Painting follows another path. It works with matter, time, perception, and uncertainty. Yet it encounters several ancient questions: how does a form appear? What gives matter its power to become? How can the visible retain the trace of what precedes it and open toward what exceeds it?

Genesis speaks of a word that distinguishes and calls the earth to bear fruit. Greek philosophy considers the internal power through which a being unfolds. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas describe a creation that receives from God its consistency and its capacity to act. Cusa and Przywara preserve the distance between the finite and the infinite without making their relation impossible.

These ideas do not coincide, and I do not wish to erase their differences. They meet, however, around the same enigma: visible form is never entirely its own origin. It comes from a depth, a relationship, and a becoming that it manifests without exhausting them.

My work is situated there: in the passage from the formless to form, when matter begins to carry a presence and the image, still traversed by what escapes it, finally becomes visible.