Praxis

PRAXIS names here a way of working in which making and thinking occur together. For Emmanuel Van der Meulen, practice is not the execution of an idea. It is the very site where the idea takes shape, corrects itself, contradicts itself. To paint is to test the means of the image not to fix a vision, but to measure what a painting can do, and what the gaze is willing to accept.

If geometry surfaces, it appears as a constraint immediately unsettled: the plane holds, then falters; the flat field thickens, is scratched, grows dull; the edge resists, then yields. Nothing here belongs to a sovereign grid or to an intact minimalism. Rigor is deliberately put at risk, as if the work sought less purity than friction, a precision that accepts dust, accident, the hand.

Within this tension between decision and revision, a link to the historical avant-gardes asserts itself, not through the borrowing of a specific vocabulary, but through the hypothesis that a simple form can carry a total question. The square is not merely a sign; it becomes a tool. A means of holding attention and of testing, on the surface itself, the shared temporality of theory, history, and practice.

Paper occupies a decisive place in this trajectory. It introduced a “paradoxical impoverishing”: allowing the brushstroke, the stain, the wash to remain visible ; not as expressive signature, but as a relinquishing of mastery and of the illusion of a “pure” surface. From this shift onward, the work articulates a dialectic between center and periphery, from the square to the border, from the flat field to the flow, as devices of attention. The issue is not form in itself, but making the viewer an active participant whose experience completes the work.

In PRAXIS, the works on paper pursue this thread at another scale—not preparatory studies, but experimental daily situations in which painting thinks itself through its own making, and where the viewer’s attention becomes one of its materials.

 1. Eric de Chassey, « The Van der Meulen Opening », in PRAXIS, Strasbourg, Pétrole éditions, 2026. (to be published)