Instability as Method
Instability is not something I correct in my work. It is the condition that allows it to exist.
I do not begin a painting with a fixed image or a resolved idea. I begin with a state. A tension already present in the body. A pressure that asks to be moved rather than clarified. Instability is not an accident that happens along the way; it is the ground on which the work unfolds.
The gesture is never decorative. It is not there to embellish or to express an emotion. It emerges because something cannot remain still. The body moves in response to that necessity, not to produce a form, but to sustain a relationship with what is unstable.
Material plays an active role in this process. Layers are added not to build coherence, but to register friction. Paint accumulates, resists, collapses, reappears. Each layer holds the memory of what preceded it, even when partially obscured. What matters is not visibility, but persistence.
Instability requires duration. It asks to stay with what does not resolve quickly. When a painting begins to settle too comfortably, something essential is lost. I interrupt, disrupt, or return to the surface to reintroduce tension. Not to complicate the image, but to keep it alive.
The unfinished is not a stage before completion. It is a deliberate state. An open structure where movement has not been reduced to form. In this sense, finishing a painting is not about closure, but about recognizing the moment when intervention would only serve control rather than attention.
Instability as method means refusing mastery as an end goal. It means allowing the painting to retain its own agency. The work is not pushed toward resolution, but accompanied until it reaches a threshold where it can stand on its own, without being explained or finalized.
What remains is not an image that delivers meaning, but a surface that holds tension. A record of gestures that did not seek to resolve themselves. A space where contradiction is not erased, but sustained.
This is how the work continues to move, even after the gesture has stopped.
Marie-Eve Dugas
