These inks reveal unexpected tones to the patient eye. They are dawns, openings of light whose spectrum bends and unfolds like eyes squinting in the glare of a cloudless sky or the barely imaginable blaze of a misty trail on fire. They are the murky reflections of inert waters swaying towards the azure, the silty mirages of pools bathed in the golden splendour of an arrhythmic sun. They are chalky veils of late autumn waves and evening dew, revealing the outline of a meadow whose tender green remains in the dying light of day. Remain, that is what it is: the gaze is summoned, invited to linger in hospitality to soak up what is born from the mud of ink. An abstraction, perhaps, but one that never strays from reality, held in place by undulating and fleeting revelations, pictorial phosphenes, and the slow upheavals brought about by the fluctuations of the day. The paintings are titled with their date of completion, which is also their date of birth: 120221 and 170221 thus punctuated a week in February 2021 under the studio's glass roof, with a sunny sky on the first day and overcast skies the next. The succession of tones is noted in a notebook. Thus, for 120221: ‘pale pink petal white / bluish white / yellowish green water white / light golden yellow / salmon pink flesh / purplish grey pink / silvery mauve / metallic greyish khaki green / antique green ochre / brownish orange ochre / reddish brown / purple brown / dark indigo / blue black’. Shades woven with nuances that cannot be captured in an inventory of the pictorial body, the shift from one colour to another, the unfathomable transition from a greyish purple pink to a silvery mauve. Words have no hold, at best a somewhat futile grasp. One must live day by day with these inks to grasp their harmonies and the modulations of their stridencies, the unexpected advent of colours that one had not seen, from dawn to dusk, according to the days, the climate, the weather and the passing of time.

1– These notes, strictly for personal use, accompany sketches made after the fact to preserve the memory of the colours used.