Working Prior to Meaning

This work operates in a space that precedes meaning.
Not in opposition to interpretation, but prior to its necessity.

Before form becomes legible, before structure is stabilized, and before perception is translated into understanding, there is a field where movement, tension, and organization are already active. This is the field in which the work takes place.

Here, painting is not treated as an image to be read or decoded. It is approached as a condition of emergence. Forms do not illustrate ideas, and gestures do not express concepts. Instead, the work attends to the moment where structure begins to appear without yet being named.

This pre-analytical space is not empty or indeterminate. It is highly active. Forces circulate, repeat, interrupt, and overlap. What appears is not chaos, but a state where order has not yet separated itself from instability. The painting holds this state without forcing resolution.

Time, within this field, does not function linearly. Gestures return, layers accumulate, and movements echo rather than progress. Duration is experienced as a density rather than a sequence. The work resists narrative development, allowing multiple moments to coexist without hierarchy.

Working prior to meaning requires restraint. It involves resisting the impulse to clarify, explain, or conclude. When meaning is imposed too early, the work collapses into representation. By remaining within pre-clarity, the painting preserves its capacity to remain open, responsive, and alive.

What results is not ambiguity for its own sake, but a sustained attentiveness to the conditions that allow form to arise. The surface becomes a site where structure is tested rather than fixed, where movement is held without being resolved, and where perception precedes interpretation.

This is not a refusal of meaning, but a commitment to its delay.
Meaning is allowed to emerge elsewhere — in the encounter — rather than being secured within the work itself.

Marie-Eve Dugas