Abstract paintings
on canvas
Emotional cartography
Philippe Halaburda — 2017 — New York
In 2017, following a period of profound personal upheaval, the practice finds its footing in the streets of New York City.
The Bronx becomes the primary territory, its ethnic complexity, its grid logic, and the daily choreography of movement through one of the most densely layered urban environments in the world.
Three series. Three ways of reading the same city. Each one a different emotional frequency of the same psychogeographical investigation.
All works are mixed media on square canvas. Available to collectors, galleries, and institutions.
Artistic process
and emotional structure
The 2017 practice balances emotional urgency with structural discipline. Acrylic establishes the underlying field, the raw emotional ground of each composition.
Tape introduces the grid: the organizing logic of urban space translated into mark-making. The two forces negotiate across every canvas,
the personal and the structural, the feeling and the system that tries
to contain it.
The Bronx as subject brought a new specificity to the work: real streets, real intersections, real communities translated not as illustration but as emotional data.
Three series in 2017 establish the visual language and the psychogeographical method that would carry forward into everything
that followed.
Statement
in 2017
After a year marked by profound despair and loss, I rebuilt myself, personally and artistically, by moving through the city.
This period culminated a dérive begun in 2015: a sustained encounter with the distortions of urban life and the weight of collective experience. New York became the territory of reconstruction.
The Bronx became the primary site. Its streets, its intersections, its cultural density gave form to emotions I could not otherwise articulate.
Each painting became a way of processing what the city was doing to me, and what I was doing to it in return.
This is where the psychogeographical practice found its voice.