The Night of Becoming "NYX"

It began with an image of a Big Bang. At the time, I was deeply preoccupied with shadows and the Platonic cave, haunted by the thought of what might lie outside it.

I dreamed of a place where magical blues and midnight blues of dawn unfolded into a vast, golden sunrise—its sun as immense as the Earth itself, impossibly close. A solitary tree stood upon a towering, mystical, and enigmatic mountain.

After this vision of the Big Bang, I fell into a cycle. All the shadows from the cave—the humans—were pulled into a vortex. Drawn by the suction of an otherworldly force, we spun toward the distant mouth of the cave: a black circle pierced by a tiny, radiant white point. We were all destined for that luminous pinprick, called to dissolve into it, to join that singular light.

The spin was vertiginous, magnetic. Figures and shadows shed their shapes and melted into a clay-like, swirling substance. This vortex consumed me for five years. I painted, and when I slept, I painted again in dreams.

I sought colors to capture it: black upon black—Noire de Mars, Noire de Carbone—yet none matched the abyss I saw. And then white: Blanc de Titane. I loved it. That fine needle of white light at the end of my Big Bang cave gleamed like Blanc de Titane, illuminating the clay shadows as they spun like the hands of a cosmic clock. Half of each form was cast in darkness, half revealed in brilliance.

At last, I realized that this place—my Big Bang cave, which I named NYX—was nothing less than the womb of the universe. After the great spin, we were all meant to be born anew.

This vision connects to my earlier project, N'aitre / To Be Born. In that work, I explored the fragile threshold between existence and becoming. With NYX, I stepped further: I did not only paint the vortex, I entered it.

I created vast paintings that transformed my atelier into an installation, a living spiral. I inhabited this womb for years, surrounded by its black whirl and white radiance, painting inside the Big Bang itself. My cat wandered with me through this spiral world, as if also drawn into its magnetic pull. I was not outside looking in—I lived inside NYX.

And even now, in 2025, I have not yet reached the end of the cave.