„I never really thought about the subject. Little by little, I began to see that you can truly find what there is to paint in anything. At first I searched for exceptional things. But after a while I started turning inward more and more, and searching for the thing that was taking shape there. Of course there is always a tension, because even though you are in love with color, with shapes, with the abstract side, the figuration always comes in and charms you. No, you can’t give up figuration and, just like that, you find yourself in this terrible tension.

After I painted many portraits, I became very dissatisfied. And then I tried somehow to destroy the portrait, to corrode it, to erase it. I think I succeeded somehow in making it no longer a portrait. But it still comes back on its own. I destroy every figure that wants to impose itself on me. My eyes are so hungry. I sit here, at the window, and look through the spyglass, and I see a tree and I like it. And I immediately say to myself – what a sketch I would make! And suddenly I see a lot of other things: a chimney, another tree, another chimney. And they all start screaming at me: me too! me too! me too. Just like students who want to answer.

This is a hunger of the gaze. The objects want something from me, I don’t know what they want. They, the poor ones, will ask me what I wanted from them. The frenzy remains. It has a name, I call it painting. In painting I always invent and tell myself that ‘this is painting’ and then it turns out that it is not painting. I mean, painting is like that, a kind of Fata Morgana. I don’t know what it is and I realize that it probably isn’t. We all do this. We seek to say what it is, to feel what it is. Practice is the only thing that interests me. The final object is always an oddity. Once I finish a work, it’s dead. It’s going to live out its afterlife.”