This material is neither simply a support nor merely a fragment of the city. It is a many-layered surface, traversed by several modes of existence at once. Physically, it is thickness, tearing, fiber, layers laid over one another. In time, it is accumulation, erasure, survival. Symbolically, it still carries the remains of public speech that has fallen silent. This complexity interests me: a material seemingly humble, yet dense with layers, tensions and memories.
A fragment of a poster-covered wall has several sides. It is, first, tangible matter, shaped by rain, glue, light and successive gestures. But it is also a threshold: between what disappears and what remains, between what was once a message and what becomes presence. In that sense, it acts as a contemporary palimpsest, not because it preserves an intact meaning beneath its layers, but because it makes the very thickness of time visible.
First there is its physical side. Nothing here is neutral: thickness, tears, patches of glue, traces of paper being pulled away, changes in color, exposed fibers. The material has already been worked on before I ever touch it. It carries a tactile, almost geological memory that makes each fragment a singular surface.
Then comes its temporal side. These papers have been pasted up, covered over, exposed, washed by rain, sometimes torn away, then covered again. They bear the marks of a nonlinear time, made of deposits, erasures and returns. What interests me is not the preservation of an original state, but the way time becomes visible within the material itself.
The material also has an urban side. It comes from a space saturated with signs, messages, announcements, promises addressed to everyone and destined to disappear quickly. Taken out of that circulation, the fragment ceases to be information. It leaves the flow, the function, the use behind. It becomes something else: no longer a message to read, but a surface to look at.
From there, a more philosophical side opens up. The fragment is no longer just matter, nor just a trace: it becomes a passage between states. Between disappearance and emergence, alteration and persistence, what reveals itself and what withdraws. I do not work on an empty surface, but with material already charged with history, where the image is never given in advance, but gradually brought into view.
Finally, there is its contemplative side. By moving this material away from the turmoil of the city, I seek neither to denounce it nor to rehabilitate it. I want to create another way of looking. A space where speed is suspended, where attention can settle, where the material is no longer passed over but truly perceived. Perhaps this is where the fragment changes most profoundly: when it becomes not a remnant, but a presence.
The drawings, abstract collages and three-dimensional works I make all arise from this same matrix. They are not variations on it, but its different states. Each time, it is less a matter of adding an image than of allowing what was already latent in the material to appear: a tension, a rhythm, a density, sometimes a form of presence.
To work with this material, then, is not merely to transform it. It is to recognize that it already contains an experience of the world: a physical, social and sensory memory that the artistic gesture does not illustrate, but displaces. From one side to another, a fragment of a poster-covered wall becomes more than urban residue: a place where material, time and what endures become visible on the same surface.