Abstract paintings
on canvas
Perceptual mapping
Philippe Halaburda — 2016 — Aix-en-Provence (France) & New York
2016 is the year of crossing.
Between Aix-en-Provence and New York, between the practice that had developed in France and the city that was about to transform it entirely.
Thirteen series on canvas map that transition: the perceptual shifts, the spatial disorientation, and the emotional residue of leaving one world and arriving in another.
All works are mixed media on square canvas. Available to collectors, galleries, and institutions.
Artistic process
and emotional structure
The 2016 practice operates in two registers that never quite reconcile,
and that's the point.
The Aix-en-Provence works are built on familiarity: the surfaces accumulate slowly and confidently from deep spatial knowledge.
Acrylic and tape map territory the hand already knows.
The New York works are built on disorientation: faster, more fragmented, less resolved. The tape lines don't converge with the same assurance.
The color fields carry more uncertainty.
Together, they record a practice relocating its center of gravity from the ordered perception of a known landscape to the raw perceptual overload of a new one. The transition is not just biographical.
It is structural, visible in the work itself.
Statement
in 2016
This is the threshold year.
Between Aix-en-Provence and New York, between a life that was ending and one that had not yet begun, I made thirteen series on canvas.
Each one processed the transition: the anticipation, the grief, the disorientation, and the strange clarity that comes from leaving everything familiar behind.
The South of France paintings carry a different quality than the New York ones, more settled, more elegiac, already aware of their own ending.
The New York paintings are raw. First encounters. Disaggregated spaces, unfamiliar scales, a city that doesn't yet know what to do with you.
This is where the practice found the question that would define the next decade: what does a place do to the people inside it?