At the beginning I had no precise form in mind. There was a dark ground, a few pale traces, then a structure that appeared and came apart as I worked.
That is how La Morphogenèse began. I did not want to illustrate the birth of a form. I wanted to stay close to the uncertain moment before it has been decided. In the studio, this means being willing to cover a successful passage, let an accident alter the composition, or stop before the image becomes too explicit.
The revisions in the painting made me think of Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach. The book brings seemingly distant fields together and asks how a new order can arise from their relations. The idea of emergence stayed with me, but never became something the painting had to prove.
On the canvas, one mark prompted another. Some forms disappeared beneath the colour and returned elsewhere, slightly changed. The eye thinks it sees a bouquet, then an architecture, then something more organic. Nothing remains settled for long.
La Morphogenèse deliberately keeps that hesitation. It is not the image of a finished form, but the record of the time in which the form was still trying to appear.
