Dérive: drifting maps
Mixed-media abstract art series
2024
Dérive: Drifting Maps is a 2024 mixed-media art series by Philippe Halaburda that explores abstraction, emotional mapping, and psychogeographical drift.
Drawing from Situationist concepts of the dérive, an intentional artistic drift through space
and experience that foregrounds emotional response to environment and movement,
all these series present works that map affective states through abstract mark-making,
geometry, and material layering
+ Drifting Maps: 2024 Series Overview
• Studio: Newburgh, NY
• 23 series: canvas, paper
and wood
This body of work uses painting, collage, and mixed media to visualize emotional states, spatial relations, and perceptual drift.
Each subseries considers how environments shape experience, memory, and psychological resonance through form and color. The visual language developed here builds on layered surfaces, structured compositions,
and symbolic geometry.
Concept & artistic process
The Situationist concept informs the Dérive series
of intentional drift, a psychogeographical practice of exploring environments through emotional and sensory response rather than predetermined routes.
This art practice embraces abstraction as a method of mapping internal states and external conditions, grounding emotional experience in layered forms and spatial relations.
Each artwork reflects an intentional, visceral relationship
to movement, environment, and cognitive mapping.
The materials, acrylic, paper, wood, and mixed media, become tools for visualizing mental cartography,
where geometry and intuition intersect.
Materials & process
My emotional state influences each artwork during the creative process. It presents a sophisticated arrangement of geometric forms and planes that overlap and open onto one another, creating the illusion of environments in flux.
Duplication and accumulation in my artworks suggest a mental space including spiritual and autobiographical encodings. These patterns of thought are now in a different transcendence by approaching the border with architecture.
I search for how to visualize our thinking process through a stark new language of absolute geometries.
Studio & context
The Dérive - drifting maps series was developed in the studio as part of an ongoing investigation into emotional mapping and geographic abstraction.
The works are intended for exhibition, acquisition,
and institutional dialogue within contemporary abstract art contexts.
