Opening: Thursday, September 3, 2026 from 6pm.
For this exhibition, I wanted to immerse myself entirely in abstraction—setting aside any notion of subject or image as a starting point for the painting. The aim was to lose myself in the painting itself: its surface, its color, the way tones play against one another.
Everything here begins with instinct—a gesture, a first chaotic sketch. What I’m after is a certain vibration, a specific texture, something matte and chalky. Through layer upon layer, I want the painting to arrive at a kind of harmony, a balance, a feeling. I’m chasing the accident, the unplanned moment.
This is slow work—studio time. Paintings can sit unresolved for weeks, caught between one state and the next. Some of the canvases are older pieces, years old, that I’ve gone back and painted over. They build up like geological strata. Where traces of earlier layers show through—the pentimenti—the painting lays bare its own history, its false starts and changes of direction.
What emerges are archipelagos of form: works that read like miniature landscapes, fragments of cities, unfinished maps, or pieces of a wall. And somewhere along the way, an image appears unbidden—the trace of a place, a memory. That’s what ends up naming the painting.
—Pierre Bellot, 2026
