Artist Statement

Born in France, Philippe Halaburda studied Graphic Design in Paris, graduating in 1996. For years, this contemporary artist has painted on a variety of supports, his personal style expressed through acrylic paints and other mediums.

He says: “When I begin a new painting, I never know what will be my creative composition. I discover it along the way and I put myself in danger, out of balance, keeping my mind opened: I always start by painting several canvases simultaneously to further accentuate this state. They define themselves by their dominant colors, the distribution of space, and even in the first brush stroke.”

Halaburda’s brushstrokes are unexpected, strong, and playful, and in making them he relies on techniques of improvisation and free movement. Constantly in flux and evocatively free of allegory or narrative, they nevertheless seem to occupy the border between figuration and abstraction. Of this intriguing balance, Halaburda says, “I want my paintings to have a real presence, to magnify a space, to own it. When I begin a new painting, I never know what will happen. I discover along the way and try to be my own audience.”

It is a way to view and fix his thoughts flow using lines, shapes, signs and codes. One can also think of imaginary landscapes that illustrate this and are freed of physical laws: gravitation, levitation, balances, trajectories, order... His compositions are fragmented, tectonic, in fragile balance, with bright colors such as those used for geological surveys and the establishment of maps.

Halaburda has created the expression of mental topography, a way to design new alphabet, to develop a full-fledged language with a unique writing, original and lively.

Since many years, he has developed his own pictural and textual language, always in movement and evolving. It comes to interior and exterior, orientation, respective positions of the objects and human in space, of self and otherness.

Philippe Halaburda lives and works in the South of France.