“What does this continuing to live imply? It implies adapting, lending new spatial habits, believing that lying low can be an act of resistance, discovering what is still friendly in the surrounding desolation and cherishing it.
These works are not finally about exploded walls, smashed roofs, and shattered masonry, but about how a person with soul and imagination and memory searches for a path through the ruins, and comes to terms with the damage to such a point that she or he invents their own gestures to accord with those of the wreckage and so find a way through the debris. The invented gestures are traceable in the visible gestures of paint. In each painting there are slivers of light, and between the wrecked gestures there is a passage to follow so as to emerge. They are paintings about crawling towards the light of the sky….”
John Berger, talking about the work of Nicolas de Stael.