Pierre Wuillaume

.I paint against the easy accident. I paint against the trace valued by default, the gesture exhibited as proof of authenticity. I claim a constructed image, clear, posed, assumed in its frontality. I seek a cold beauty, non-sentimental. Not to decorate, but to install a doubt, a distance. I want the eye to collide with the evidence of a controlled surface, for the gaze to slide first, then to question. I choose the smooth not to flee from the material, but to say something else with it. For the smooth, today, is loaded: it evokes the digital image, advertising, retouching, the industrial rendering. I want to divert these codes — by painting this smoothness by hand, loading it with ambiguities. Thus, beneath the apparent simplicity of my flat colors and contrasts, I place tensions, displacements, silent fractures. I paint landscapes where time seems frozen. Scenes where the gaze is invited to get lost in a deceptive perfection. I refuse the picturesque, the folklore. The port I represent is not a holiday memory: it is a theater of flat colors, a geometry of shadows and reflections, a mental space. In a world saturated with fleeting images, I choose the smooth as resistance. Not to flatter the gaze, but to stop it. To relearn to see the surface, the composition, the color as fields of meaning. I paint smooth. But I paint tense.