"If art making makes me an artist I would say that being an artist is a way of relating to the world. As an incomplete entity myself, art is the way that I manage to find a balance within myself. It’s an exercise that intensifies my presence and at the same time reminds me of my ephemerality - the different sides of the same coin.

Having been working with modes of apparition for some time now I feel the need to expand my thoughts around these concepts that I go in and out of continuously every day. Apparition is a powerful 'container', a sort of transitory state where language fights to survive. It’s a dance between what can and could, the past and the future.

Because I see it as a conceptual experience this mode of apparition operates within abstraction. Inside of abstraction there are modes of apparition like spirituality, figuration, symbolism… As a mode of apparition, figuration sometimes uses gestalt as a way to complete the real. Not just visually, but it can also be done emotionally. Using emotions complexifies what can appear in the process. Gestalt’s process at its peak happens in the mind of the viewer because they have very little to no clues of what is left or what is becoming in the work.

Figuration is the psychology of creating content. The end of figuration is meant to create a space where we face the many ways that figuration functions for us to realize that figuration never comes alone."

- Manuel Mathieu, 2024