Études pour coups fumants

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The exhibition Études pour coups fumants extends my pictorial research into irregularly contoured formats. These atypical supports, with their rounded edges, directly shape my approach to the pictorial space. Unlike traditional formats, they activate the form of the stretcher itself, prompting a more structured organization of the composition and generating gestures that are at times unexpected. Some movements follow the curves of the support, while others introduce a dynamic of rupture. This free and instinctive gestural language is counterbalanced by more mechanical interventions that organize the space and establish a form of tension or counterpoint.

The exhibition foregrounds an economy of gestures in which each intervention aims to be radical. The expression “smoking shot,” borrowed from the vocabulary of billiards, served as a conceptual point of departure: it refers to a shot struck with such force and speed that it raises a cloud of dust. This image led me to conceive of the pictorial gesture not as a planned sequence of actions, but as a decisive impulse — a charged movement launched with intensity, at times intuitively, engaging the entire body. In this spirit, I chose to leave a portion of the raw canvas visible in each work, maintaining a tension between emergence and interruption, between what begins and what is deliberately left unresolved.