THOUGHTS ON MY ART

Is my art eruptive?

My painting, deceptively spontaneous yet intuitive, is a cry responding to the breath of a singular inspiration. My art, like a volcanic eruption, colours the sky of my sorrows with the colours of my innermost being. Although my works may sometimes seem to belong to primitive expressionism, this interpretation is false: they would be closer to the label of eruptive art.

At the twilight of my life, I finished painting in pastel tones; this is therefore the sign that the indignant child within me has reached fulfilment.

The highest form of intelligence is common sense.

Today, through my writings and this static film that is my website, I transmit.

If I had been you, I would be the other who would say: “I do not understand.”

And yet, I have survived more than 75 years of suffering caused by human mediocrity.

Paradoxically, my painting is joyful, even though it often appears tormented.

I created to resist mental decay, with a violent urge to fail or destroy my works. This reflex of destruction is a compulsion intended to conceal my joyful nature. I am a survivor of the human shipwreck.

My painting is far too sophisticated to be considered outsider art.

The spontaneity of my lines has nothing to do with ignorance of pictorial academicism.

In truth, my nature rejects any conception that would compel me to be politically correct.

I need to detach myself from physical reality so that my own expressions can take shape without being contaminated by the relics of complacency.

My painting approaches what is called primal art. I fully live divine moments in which the words of men have not yet been written. I devour the nebulous; I am a substantive.

Uprooted in the land of my ancestors,
The sun of an infinity took my hand to carry me to an abstract father.

My works are technically spontaneous; their clarity is the culmination of long mental reflections, subjected to my gommisme, this art of creating through erasure.

I am like a monk creating icons, finding in the division of a surface to be painted the spirituality needed to create a divine rhythm between facets of luminous colour.

And yet, I paint out of sorrow, in search of what has been lost. I am an artist of faith, a child of joyful candour, so as to live the beauty of life.

With “The Sunflower’s Petals”, I reach the substantive of my art.

I have become a creator of icons of life.

Mathius TO’ERAU, the Suréviste. Tahiti, August 2026