26 museomag   02 ‘ 2021 
„I don’t like people telling me what to do.“ 
old velours with flowers on it, or old bags, or other 
canvasses with a history. These tissues interact with the 
paint I use. I accept the result I get, and never interve- 
ne. In a way you could say that I am in an impasse: the 
system that I’ve created is like a room with limiting walls. 
One wall represents what I don’t want to make. The 
other one represents what I cannot make. The painting 
is my road to freedom; by overcoming the narrow cir- 
cumstances that I imposed. The results of what I create 
are always unexpected and surprising, because I never 
expect anything. Even if the results are, so to say, nega- 
tive, my work shows me its endless possibilities, and thus, 
even negative results to me are just possibilities. As a 
whole, my work tells a story about what I do and it does 
show the system I work in, but if you look at my works 
independently, they just are.“ 
Did you already have this system in mind when you 
created your first work? 
„No. I started working on non-stretched canvas, because 
the framework was disturbing me since I was working 
on a floor, and walked over the canvas. I decided to re- 
move the framework, and saw that the canvas started 
to interact with the gravel on the surface I was working 
on. When I had finished my work, I discovered that on 
the other side of it, another work had created itself. The 
gravel stuck to the backside of the painting and created 
a print. I thought that the back of the work became as 
interesting as the front.“ 
„I DON‘T LIKE POLITICS“ 
From there, how did it come to the Supports/ 
Surfaces movement? 
„I had met Patrick Saytour and Daniel Dezeuze and we 
appreciated each other’s work, which we had created 
independently. We discovered that there were similari- 
ties in our approach. The three of us were working on 
the idea of deconstructing the traditional idea of what a 
painting was: an image on a stretched canvas. We disco- 
vered that we were walking in the same direction on the 
artroad and started to exhibit where we could, and where 
the circumstances allowed us to. We didn’t exclude the 
established order: museums just didn’t have an access 
© 
f. 
lagarde, 
1985 
„WHAT IS ART ANYWAY?“ (2/2)