I Work Like a Gardener

Anonymous work should be both collective and very personal. Everyone should do what they want, as naturally as breathing. But they should have no ulterior motive and wish to sign their breath.

The march of the world is leading toward collectivity

I work in a state of passion and frenzy. When I begin a canvas, I obey a physical impulse, a need to act; it’s like a physical discharge.

More than the picture itself, what counts is what it throws into the air, what it exhales. It doesn’t matter if the image is destroyed. Art can die; what matters is that it scatters seeds on the ground. An artwork must be fertile. It must give birth to a world. But we mustn’t stop there; the picture must make everything clear; it must fertilize the... See more

Things follow their natural course. They grow, they ripen. I must graft. I must water, as with lettuce. Ripening goes on in my mind. So I’m always working at a great many things at the same time.

To work like a gardener was to create life itself—the autonomous life of a visual universe that, in the artist’s words, was a world set in motion.