What does the title EPODE say about your work and your way of painting? What does it mean to you?

In my works there is a coexistence of two separate worlds, made visible in one: the rational world and the poetic world. What we see are nostalgic abstract reinterpretations of my own memories, reinterpretations that are resolved in two stages. The first is the rational stage, where I reinterpret my memories by freely drawing what the moment I am reviving suggests to me. The second is the poetic stage, in which the symbols created during the "rational" stage are covered with a layer of paint. By adding the paint freely, I don't know what will or will not be visible once it dries. This is a metaphor for what remains visible of that memory now in me, as some elements of the memory have been erased, as in the paint. The two stages, or in other words, the two worlds (poetic and rational) coexist and work together to create a final piece, a song, that leads to a new world; just as in an Epode where two unequal verses form the final lyrical couplet. Ana Monsó

What does the title EPODE say about your work and your way of painting? What does it mean to you?

To evoke what the word epode brought to life in me, I would quote Horace: "But I, for whom life has no charm but you living, if not unbearable? You tell me to continue in my leisure. Will I do it? It is sweet only with you." In order to provoke an existential reflection, I would like to address the question: By what are we animated? The enigma of creation has always been sublimated by an existential dichotomy, a subtle balance between evanescence and timelessness. It is indeed that our perception of the world is based on three constituent elements, matter, energy and knowledge (information). Thus, an artistic creation is itself tinged with these principles, by incorporating matter, from our daily life, energy, embodied by gesture, movement and action, as well as affective or sensory intelligence, the emotional tone that emanates from the work and the experience it provokes. Being similar to a fundamental necessity for the human being, it is however deprived of any practical utility, carrying in itself this paradox which makes of it at the same time a spiritual manifestation (of the spirit) and physical (in matter) by inducing a sensitive experience. Mathias Bensimon

WHEN I GROW UP, I WANT TO BE A CHILD AGAIN

I center my work on the self-reflection of sacred moments in my life. Drawing from my childhood memories, I create freely, allowing the final work to be a fusion of my inspirations. My work is an ode to latent childlike innocence. I try to reinterpret the world without rules and boundaries, as a child would do before social judgment and established norms were imposed. Ana Monsó

STATEMENT

In the field of my practice, light constitutes the heart of my work. Light as a medium and substance, but also light as a revealing intelligence. As a testimony of the different manifestations of reality, light can appear to us under a multitude of forms and reflections. It raises the question of the visible and the invisible. How to make visible the invisible? How to touch the immaterial source while passing by the matter? Mathias Bensimon