I took time to recharge after my Apollo 365° project, during which I created one poster a day for five years. That break allowed me to question myself—my work—but also my view of life and the way I approach it. Over the past three years, a lot has happened, both personally and professionally.
A lack of freedom and creative decision-making—when choices are restricted by constraints imposed by someone else—eventually suffocates momentum. You no longer create: you respond. You no longer explore: you optimize. So I felt the need to return to the daily creative challenge I had, strangely enough, imposed on myself.
Except this time, I won’t be making one poster a day, but one work of art.
Motivations
If I didn’t start sooner, it’s largely because of a feeling of illegitimacy. I didn’t study at a Fine Arts school, but at a visual arts school. Between these two worlds there are differences—sometimes subtle, sometimes obvious: one begins more from the self; the other often starts from someone else’s request. One can be visceral; the other, in most cases, aims to solve an objective—often a commercial one.
And yet, I was trained in art history. Artists and illustrators taught me methods, shared guidance and advice. I studied painters, experimented with techniques, and learned how to look—and how to understand.
Between 2013 and 2015, I ran a painting and collage studio in Switzerland with a colleague, where we painted regularly. Since moving to China, I haven’t found that kind of studio space again, so I focused my efforts on graphic creation. I drew, but I no longer painted.
By looking at the great masters of the past and contemporary artists, I eventually understood one thing: my place doesn’t exist until I take it. No one will step into it for me. It’s up to me to enter it—without waiting. To add my stone to the building, however small it may be. I don’t have to be ashamed, or feel guilty: I love painting—and even more, I love creating. Painting may only be a medium, but above all, it’s a passage. So I’m coming back to it. Now.
Essence
Substrart is a survival tool: a way to quench my creative thirst. Here, I expose my visual truth—I deliver it, unfiltered, to the fast and uncompromising world of the internet. To hurried eyes, to hands that scroll, to a stream of images that devours everything. I choose to stand there deliberately off-balance: present, vulnerable, active.
Every day, I paint in my own emotional language. I release tension, inject energy, and turn thought into matter. My ideas become a laboratory: daily inspiration settles there, warps, sharpens, and then takes form.
Each piece is a fragment of soul, born from a sensation at a specific moment in time. The challenge becomes a map of a year devoted to art: a journey through my fears, my impulses, my obsessions. I’m not chasing perfection; I’m chasing the trace. The real.
Substrart is a piece of me: a way to meet myself every day. An argument against time. A discipline that allows me to discover, fragment by fragment, the structure of my own mind—the pattern of my chaos and my control.
Project rules
- I commit to creating one artwork a day, even if it’s fragile, even if it’s incomplete.
- I forbid myself from endlessly reworking a piece: each day gets its own artwork.
- I don’t hide my failures.
- I share without restraint: artworks, reflections, discoveries—even what may seem useless to me.