MACADAM GALLERY is pleased to present “Pont des RAL”, the second solo exhibition in Belgium of the French artist Toma-L.

“In the beginning, I don’t really know what I’m doing, but I want to know what prefigures my
paintings…

For this exhibition, I see myself as a constructor. I begin by posing the foundations. Using the main gable wall of my atelier as a canvas to create a roadmap of black materials: willow charcoal, compressed charcoal, ink… I placed this blackness at the centre, the colours surrounding it. The roadmap, the colour-belt, the background become a kind of pictoral pathway. I stapled sheets of paper onto the wall like windows. I had already chosen the colour palette. Colours which trespass upon the “paper openings”. Colours which often outline the blackness.

This first series of creations “signify the idea of the edges of the painting”; like Pierre Alechinsky’s major work “Central Park” in which the black outline serves to highlight what is being depicted and is simultaneously an integral part of the whole.

From here sprang a succession of gestures, figurative in nature, always black surrounded by a spontaneous application of colour. I repeated this ‘tableau’ of black surrounded by colour fourteen times, fourteen colours from the chromatic scale chosen for this exhibition to generate the piece and its backdrop. Like turning the pages of a book one by one, lingering each time, the words run into one another, but each letter has its own distinguishing form.

The second series is characterised by a change in scale. I moved onto a much larger window, a bigger format which altered both the composition and the words. On certain sheets the drawing, always done in black, is less figurative. It designates the delimitation of the format, and the colours applied around it now seep in bit by bit, sometimes in strokes sometimes dots..

The third and final phase of preparation is distinguished by a series of canvases which I glue down and smooth out. I then remove the sheets of paper which made up the background in order to restore them onto the canvases which causes the wall to recede into the windows I have created.”

Toma-L