De‑scribe
the subtle

As a child I took it to heart to help others in order to understand. Ever since, sharing what I sense of the mystery of life has been a source of well‑being. A transmission that finds its most accomplished form in art, rich with meaning, and which in all humility exceeds me.

To me, transmitting presupposes a sensibility gifted with synthesis. An aesthetic asceticism which at the height of its paroxysm takes shape as a binary system, adopting the wide‑open contrast between absence and the sum of all lights — black and white.

From this precursor state of a rudimentary alphabet, a writing arises that gives body to the subtle world. Another way then opens onto contemplation, one that sets me in precarious balance between the desire to reveal a solemn work and the fear of profaning it.

When it reaches a certain degree of refinement, an incarnation transcends the animal, the moral and the spiritual at once. This threefold unification, the summit of human development, can be handed down through time as knowledge, thanks to writing.

First as pictograms standing for ideas and objects, writing evolves towards a dizzying abstraction able to bring our deepest thoughts to the surface. Adopted by many civilisations, its technical maturity takes material form as ink and paper. A curious, ephemeral support that stands guard over the most precious goods. And so I settled on this form, proven over millennia… a calligrapher’s brush marrying India ink to its support.

The substance, for its part, takes shape in the Gaussian curve. I perceive it as the equation of the living. Synthesis of synthesis. It diagrams phenomenology at its best. In it I see an equation of life condensed into a single line. A truth common to every phenomenon of the observable universe for billions of years, summed up by:a beginning……a middle……and an end.

This line of life becomes a universal symbol that transcends linguistic, cultural and geographical barriers. A tool for anyone aspiring to a foreknowledge of truth.

Born into a family of prolific artists, Barthélémy Chojnacki explores minimalism. Since his beginnings in film, this French‑Polish artist born in Łódź in 1982 has worked in the graphic arts to distil the vital quintessence. Today he writes in fractals, to seize new realities, in his studio at Saint‑Rémy‑lès‑Chevreuse, France.

Henceforth, his lines of life sweep away vernacular writing and lead him to a resolutely universal calligraphy. Through keen attention, he makes of his inner life a mirror reflecting traces of the subtle world around us.

He anchors himself in ink through meditation. And so, from his instinctive, spontaneous movements come curved lines endlessly interlacing, lending the whole an organic bearing…