Artist: Pierre Bellot

For the Vallée FM exhibition, I wanted to immerse myself fully in abstraction, setting aside the idea of a subject or an image as the starting point for a painting. My aim was to become completely absorbed in the painting itself: its matt, chalky surface, its colour, and the relationships between different tones. Here, everything emerges from intuition, from a gesture, from a first chaotic sketch. I am searching for a vibration, harmony, a sense of balance. I seek out the accidental and unpredictability.

And yet, this painting remains subtly permeated by the landscape of my childhood. Vallée FM was the local radio station of Marne-la-Vallée, an area of purpose-built new towns: a strange, hybrid landscape oscillating between architectural utopia, pastiche, and an artificial setting reminiscent of The Truman Show.

The aim is not to depict the reality of this place, but to construct my paintings in the way this landscape itself was built: through sedimentation. The paintings take shape over a long period in the studio, with successive layers being built up, sometimes over older works that date back several years. By erasing, covering, and leaving traces of underlying layers visible, the canvas reveals its previous states and its own shifts in direction.

What emerges are archipelagos of forms: works that resemble miniature landscapes, sections of cities, incomplete maps, or fragments of walls. From this process surfaces an involuntary image: the evocation of a memory. The painting does not seek to reproduce reality: rather, it captures its ghostly waves, the memory of a setting and its fading frequencies.

Pierre Bellot
Proofreading: Ginger Clark