Dan Potentier

Potentier paints bodies on the margins of the night, caught in a state of urgency. Rooted in lived experience, his images are not acts of testimony but of transformation, where the composition, sometimes fragmented, reconfigures scenes rather than reproducing them. Painting unfolds here like a conversation, until it asserts its own conclusion. Through the exhaustion of pigment and the dilution of gesture, the figures gain in intensity as they escape any fixed state. While the bodies do not seek to make themselves desirable, the painting itself remains permeated by a demand for beauty. These figures appear in states of vulnerability where the gaze no longer controls what it sees. Beauty persists there as a necessity, at the risk of exclusion.
Painting thus becomes an act of preservation, a way of resisting oblivion.