Patrick Sadler

"The image of the nature of the image" is a play on words that brings together "the image of nature" and "the nature of the image". While observing nature in order to paint it, I noticed that I was looking more at an image in my thoughts than at a reality in front of me. In soliloquy, a mental chat began: what is it made of, this image in us, which we experience daily without realizing it? We live this image in ourselves and believe in a reality that is only an appearance that comes from our mental projection.v

My painting integrates a research on the nature of the image. Nature that we are unable to locate. As soon as we try to seize it, it escapes us. It seems as ephemeral as a soap bubble, which, when touched, bursts. How can we transmit it then, and how can we be sure that it will appear to others as it appears to me?

And what's more, it is imbued with a multitude of emotions subject to perpetual change. In order not to get lost in it, I try to use the external object as a reference. But there too, as soon as I approach it, its image fades and loses its representation. In fact, my painting tries to unveil this machination that makes us believe in the existence of an image building our ego. Alas, it is also an unstable medium subject to impermanence.

The dichotomy of the nature of the mental image is reflected in my pictorial research.

Seen from a distance my paintings show the illusion of an image representing the perception of a form of reality as we can perceive it. But already the chromatic choice and the expressiveness of the tracing makes this illusion gradually fade away and brings us closer to painting.

Up close, the non-figurative side with its inherent pictorial qualities dominates perception. It is an abstract world that offers us a system of coloured patches with its topological variability, opacities and transparencies.

This search for knowledge of the nature of the image leads us to ask questions not only of an epistemological nature, but also of a phenomenological nature:

Where is the mental image located? What is it made of? What is its duration?