Nulla dies sine pictura

On the work of Pierre-Xavier Collardot: “Nulla dies sine pictura” could be Pierre-Xavier Collardot’s motto. The “Ritual paintings” illustrate the incessant eruption of a turbulent inner life, boiling with desires and questions. They constitute a response, a necessity for the balance of the emerging painter in his desire to confront the challenges of creation, torn between every possibility and the reality of time and materials. While following the rigor of such an approach is reassuring, it requires a stimulating letting-go that encourages repetition, weariness, experimentation, discoveries and dead ends, the fertile soil and the nuggets. One must be persevering, clear-sighted but slightly reckless, to remain confident in uncertainty. Each day, his dexterity confronts a physical and mental state in the studio or on his travels. The subjects oscillate between intimate questions and existential reflections that unsettle experience within the possibilities of the moment. Intimacy, universality, self-portraits, observations of the masters, scales, symbolism, history, logbook, games, humor, spirituality and masquerades coexist, confront one another, contradict one another or reconcile in a sublimation that the daily act of painting calls for. In harmony with doubts and certainties, this hope, combining the progress of a practice with the flow of chance, finds its fulfillment in the profusion of a body of work forming a breathtaking mosaic of expressions (already 1,201 paintings at the time of writing this text), but also in the demand for the independence of each autonomous fragment incorporated into this corpus, a giant orchestra in which each entity plays its own part, its specificity, its strangeness. Before our eyes, a universe in expansion is taking shape, a cosmos and its stars, sometimes shooting stars. This ritual enters into dialogue with the immensity of the territories of painting, with its history, its movements and its effects on the lives of artists and viewers. Pierre-Xavier Collardot walks joyfully in the footsteps of his predecessors. Each day, his curiosity brings him into contact with archaeology, the masters, Goya, James Ensor, Pierre Bonnard, Georgia O’Keeffe, Anni Albers, Etel Adnan, Frida Kahlo, bad painting, abstract expressionism, quotation painting, conceptual painting and many others. The process is based on an economy of means. His skill and his naive ambitions are not poses. Pierre-Xavier Collardot furrows his own fresh path, nourishing his memory, his heart, his eye and his hand. His acquired virtuosity has substance; it is not merely the repetition of easy techniques. His practice is sensitive, sincere and unborrowed. This know-how exhausts itself so as not to become bored; it rebounds elsewhere, drifts, plays with codes and with itself. This imposed framework becomes an opening toward the known and the unknown, perpetuating the miracle of life until renewal. This life-size notebook accompanies the other battles he wages on larger canvases. His training with the painter Marion Bataillard constitutes a formative period of exchange between peers, like the beginning of a creative apprenticeship that we encourage him to share. In an era that values excessive capitalism, whose public and private art schools and cultural institutions sadly echo it while enjoying hierarchies and insularity, it is heartening to appreciate a new shoot, not yet diverted from the essence of creation, which, with the simplicity of a desire, a curiosity, the learning of a capacity and perhaps a pleasure-suffering, sublimates matter. Still young, Pierre-Xavier Collardot travels through painting; let us hope that he retains within himself the ingredients that will prevent him from succumbing to the lure of overly smooth success. With pleasure, let us observe today that the essential is already there, in his promises and false appearances; let us wager that baring himself in the alchemy of painting will continue to point him toward a passage to the guarantee of his freedom. Jérémy Chabaud, August 2026.