Exhibitions & Curatorial Discussions

The Tactile Sublime: Paint as Living Geologic Flesh

Aurelia, when walking through your Paris atelier, one feels less inside a modern workshop and more inside an alchemist’s laboratory. You harvest raw lapis from Badakhshan, crush your own cinnabar, and simmer walnut husks. Why this insistence on tactile materiality in an age dominated by pixel and algorithm?

Because digital pixels possess no weight, no mortality, and no resistance. When you grind lapis lazuli into linseed oil, the crystal fractures at microscopic angles. Light doesn’t just bounce off; it gets refracted, trapped, and released differently at 9:00 in the morning than at twilight. That temporal breath is something synthetic pigment simply cannot do.

And the gold leaf? It has such historic religious weight—from Byzantium to Fra Angelico.

For me, gold is not wealth; it is distilled sunlight held hostage on earth. When applied over dark, volcanic umber, it creates an unbearable tension: sacred and terrestrial, immortal and decaying.

Dissecting Negative Space: From Canvas to Blackened Bronze

Your transition from monumental impasto paintings into heavy cast bronze and travertine sculptures felt unexpected to many collectors. Was it an evolution or a reaction?

Every painter reaches a point of physical frustration with the two-dimensional picture plane. In 2022, I found myself literally pressing my body against the wet canvas trying to give it volume. The bronze sculptures became my way of making the shadow stand independently without needing the wall.