Abstract paintings
on canvas
Dérive
Philippe Halaburda — 2024 — New York
In 2024, the practice develops through the concept of dérive, moving through space, perception, and material without a fixed path.
Nine canvas series build open abstract maps shaped by observation, drift, and material response rather than predetermined structure.
Acrylic, tape, and recycled materials create layered compositions that balance control and spontaneity; each work records movement through emotional and spatial territory.
All works are mixed media on square canvas. Available to collectors, galleries, and institutions.
Artistic process
and emotional structure
The 2024 practice is built around the Situationist concept of dérive, a purposeful drift through space and perception, following the pull of environment and material rather than a plan.
Acrylic builds the underlying energy of each composition, gestural, accumulative, and responsive to what came before. Tape introduces structure: boundaries that guide, divide, and occasionally contradict the marks beneath them. Recycled materials add texture, history, and unpredictability, elements that carry the residue of other uses, other contexts.
The nine series of 2024 each begin with a different question —biological, cognitive, geopolitical, neurological, or social- and build outward through material decisions rather than imagery.
Playfulness and drift remain central. Each work develops through movement, adjustment, and layering, a dynamic surface where structure and chance coexist, inviting the viewer to navigate freely and form their own reading.
The body of work as a whole traces a year of movement through emotional and spatial territory: nine entry points, one continuous investigation.
Artist statement
in 2024
2024 marks a year of deliberate disorientation, not as a loss of direction, but as a method.
The nine series gathered here share a common impulse: to resist the predetermined reading, to move through subject matter the way a body moves through a city, drawn by forces that are not always visible, redirected by what is encountered rather than what was planned.
The subjects range from the biological to the geopolitical, biomimicry, neural sensation, remote conflict, counter-cartography. What connects them is not theme but posture: each series begins from a position of not-knowing and builds toward a form of understanding that could only have been reached through making.
Some of these works carry grief; others carry optimism. Neither is resolved. Neither is performed. They coexist on the canvas the way they coexist in a year, present at the same time, pulling in opposite directions, neither canceling the other out.
This is the work of 2024. Not a conclusion. A record of movement.