Le bonbon Embrace

Some works are created with a specific purpose in mind—and eventually come to belong to everyone. *Enlacement* is one of them. In its first life, this painting was an act of courage by proxy. A woman had something essential to say to those she loved—something true, fundamental, and unyielding—but the words refused to come. I painted them instead. The painting broke through the silence where the voice could not yet go. It was a coming out, a declaration, and an offering all at once. In its second life, *Enlacement* opened itself up to the universal. For desire—in all the complexity of that word—is perhaps the most widely shared and least openly acknowledged experience of the human condition. The desire for the other, in all its emotional and carnal dimensions. The desire for oneself rediscovered in the gaze of someone who truly sees you. The desire for what two presences might create together—for a lifetime, for a night, for a suspended moment, or in the most beautiful fantasy ever kindled. In my work, I depict the space between what is felt, the unsaid, and the spoken. That fragile, electric territory where fantasy still exists in all its purity, before words diminish or betray it. *L’Enlacement* is a declaration with no specific recipient. It belongs to anyone—including myself, on countless occasions—who has ever kept something immense to themselves for fear of losing it by naming it.