In the “Explosion” series, we vary not only the organisation of the brushstrokes, but also the form of the support, for several reasons.
The first state takes up the idea of the outline of the support, which adapts to the posture of the model. This is to reinforce the expressiveness of the whole, to show the essential (the model), to have a homology which makes the link between the various states.

However, it turns out that the first state posed the problem of integrating the figure into its background; the background appearing to be proportionally important in relation to the space occupied by the figure.

We chose the delimitation of this support in order to address another problem which appeared to us in the face of paintings in which the figures were inscribed on backgrounds that presented neither architecture, nor landscape, nor interior, but only an impasto of pictorial matter.

Some of these isolated backgrounds are real abstract paintings. This observation allowed us to pose the image/matter problem differently. We noticed that in our first state where we try to integrate figure and background, the abstract background already appears to us as an abstract painting. But it is also not considered as such, because background and figure are united.

Still in our perspective, which is to separate without isolating things from the whole, we started to re-cut the first support (our starting support) to have several different paintings.

These paintings had to be different and at the same time function as a whole, i.e. as a single painting.
Thus the second state of the fragmentation series shows us that by separating the background from the figure, we obtain abstract paintings (four in our case) which all, however, still function around the central figure as a background.

The third state shows us that a reorganisation of the pictorial gestures brings the central figure even closer to abstraction. Here we see the importance of the cutting out of the central form. Close to the silhouette of the human body, the cutting of the support evokes all the formal expressiveness that state number two evokes through representation.
It is state number three that works best in terms of expression. The suggestion of the representation, the accentuated division of the colours, the stylisation, render us the best expression of the explosion.

The fourth state always suggests the central form through the configuration of the cut-outs. But it is in the continuity of the reading that we know that there has been representation. The only representation that remains is that of the geometric figures that we have obtained by successive separation. Here the abstraction is obvious, but the figuration is always suggested by the starting point that we have kept constant. A real abstraction, which would be the opposite of the starting form, would be a place left empty (in the exhibition room) after the fourth state.

But here again, because of our perception mechanisms, because of our memory and because of the afterglow effect, we would be tempted to see the previous figures. This is how we try to bring together realism and abstraction, figuration and non-figuration, to take up the polemic of our time to propose to the supporters of abstraction and the supporters of representation a painting where both coexist.