Before Language: Why Art Is, for Me, a Way of Thinking One’s Relationship to the Self
I do not use art to illustrate ideas that are already clear. I use it to remain in that precise space before things stabilize into words.
For me, painting is a way of thinking one’s relationship to the self before language, before concepts, before narratives, before explanations. It is an uncomfortable, unstable, often loud space, and it is exactly there that something essential takes place.
My works are loud not by provocation, but because they take shape at the very moment when experience has not yet been organized. Where tensions are still intertwined, where emotions have not found their hierarchy, where nothing is yet “clear.” This moment is often avoided, bypassed, or rationalized too quickly. Yet it is there that one’s relationship to the self reveals itself most honestly.
Clarity, when it arrives, is always secondary. It is a consequence, never a starting point.
In my artistic practice, I work with what overflows: layers, collisions, interrupted gestures, returns. The canvas becomes a space where elements can coexist without being immediately resolved. I am not trying to organize chaos, but to inhabit it long enough for a direction to begin emerging from within.
This process is not very different from what I observe in coaching.
Insight almost never appears as a clear sentence. It emerges first as a sensation, a bodily tension, a diffuse impression, an unease that is difficult to name. It arises from the entanglement of multiple elements that have been brought into awareness: past experiences, present reactions, internal contradictions, restrained impulses. In other words, insight emerges within an organized chaos, well before language comes to grasp it.
This is precisely where my artistic work informs how I understand insight. Painting has taught me something essential: wanting to understand too quickly is often a way of protecting oneself. Remaining a little longer in what is not yet clear allows for a more accurate, more integrated, less defensive awareness to arise.
In both art and coaching, there is a critical point where everything feels confused, charged, uncomfortable. Many seek to exit that space as quickly as possible. I stay there, because that is where something shifts.
Chaos is not the enemy of clarity. It is its condition.
When the elements have been sufficiently seen, felt, and traversed, awareness can emerge. Not as a logical conclusion, but as a lived evidence. Only then does language become useful. It comes to name what is already known inwardly.
My works are therefore not answers. They are spaces of passage. Places where the gaze can learn to remain with what has not yet stabilized, where one’s relationship to the self can reorganize without being forced, where clarity, when it arrives, is inhabited rather than imposed.
This is the posture I cultivate, both in my artistic work and in my accompaniment. A posture that respects the time required for emergence, and that recognizes that what matters most is never formulated immediately.
Marie-Eve Dugas
