For me an object is something living. This cigarette or this box of matches contains a secret life much more intense than that of certain human beings.
A simple line painted with the brush can lead to freedom and happiness.
What I am looking for... is an immobile movement, something which would be the equivalent of what is called the eloquence of silence, or what St. John of the Cross, I think it was, described with the term 'mute music'.
The works must be conceived with fire in the soul but executed with clinical coolness.
My characters have undergone the same process of simplification as the colors. Now that they have been simplified, they appear more human and alive than if they had been represented in all their details.
I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.
The painting rises from the brushstrokes as a poem rises from the words. The meaning comes later.
I work like a gardener.
Painting must be fertile. It must give birth to a world… it must fertilize the imagination.
Art class was like a religious ceremony to me. I would wash my hands carefully before touching paper or pencils. The instruments of work were sacred objects to me.
Throughout the time in which I am working on a canvas I can feel how I am beginning to love it, with that love which is born of slow comprehension.
To gain freedom is to gain simplicity.
The more I work, the more I want to work.
I feel the need of attaining the maximum of intensity with the minimum of means. It is this which has led me to give my painting a character of even greater bareness.
More important than a work of art itself is what it will sow. Art can die, a painting can disappear. What counts is the seed.
The more ignoble I find life, the more strongly I react by contradiction, in humour and in an outburst of liberty and expansion.
