On Painting Before Meaning

Painting, for me, begins before meaning takes hold.
Not before intention, but before interpretation. There is a moment where something insists without yet knowing what it is. My work inhabits that moment.

I am not interested in painting clarity, nor in resolving what appears on the surface. What draws me to painting is the unstable zone where tension, movement, and matter coexist without hierarchy. Before form stabilizes. Before language intervenes. Before the image becomes readable.

In this space, painting is not a tool for explanation. It is a site of emergence.

The gesture arrives first, not as an expressive act meant to communicate something, but as a response to an internal pressure that has not yet found its shape. The body moves before the mind organizes. Layers accumulate not to build coherence, but to hold traces of what has passed through. What remains on the canvas is not an answer, but a residue.

I work with instability as a condition, not a problem to solve. Tension is not something I attempt to eliminate. It is something I allow to remain visible. The painting does not seek balance; it tolerates imbalance long enough for something else to appear.

This is why the work resists closure. An unfinished state is not a lack of completion, but a refusal to collapse experience into a fixed meaning. When a painting becomes too resolved, it stops listening. I linger instead at the threshold, where chaos has not yet organized itself into language, but has begun to breathe.

Painting before meaning means trusting that sense will emerge without being forced. It requires staying with what is unclear, allowing contradictions to coexist, and resisting the impulse to name too quickly. In that suspension, the work remains alive.

I do not paint to illustrate an idea. I paint to remain in contact with a process that precedes understanding. The canvas becomes a space where something can be seen without being defined, felt without being interpreted, encountered without being contained.

What interests me is not what the painting says, but what it allows to surface.

Before meaning, there is movement.
Before resolution, there is tension.
This is where my work begins.

Marie-Eve Dugas