In turn, Dan Barichasse conjures up the elements Earth, Air, Water, Fire, Breath and Emptiness, freed from any prior structure, and unfurling in greater freedom, re-enacting the formation of matter and the transition from chaos to an organised universe. In a systematic search for the origins of life, the painter seems to want to draw the invisible cosmos.

With the multiple layers of inks and emulsions he superimposes on his tondis, which measure a staggering 130 cm in diameter, Dan Barichasse, like an alchemist, plunges us into the microcosm as much as the macrocosm, reminding us that we are as much atom as stardust.

All his works are largely inspired by his assiduous and inspiring reading of countless biblical and ancient texts, many of them poetic. He is a true abstraction incarnate. The critic Christian Noorbergen speaks of “an effusion of extreme slowness that speaks of time and matter, dust and flesh, and perhaps even the inside of the skin and organs. All the source-textures seem to meet there”, and goes on to write that

“in the forms that are born, at random from gesture and matter, we never see definitive forms we never see definitive forms, but rather enchantments, slow pre-organic impulses, and strange appearances of organs. Finally, floating like a dream, a subterranean eroticism, always unfulfilled, and therefore always active”.