Ça tombe bien! (2025) is an ongoing series of 42 woodblock prints


 Someone told me we perceive time as passing more quickly when we’re learning new things. When I was a kid, my father used to ask me what I had been doing all day at school: “Trying to make empty bags stand upright?” I could easily imagine the highly improbable activity, though it was definitely not what I’d done that day. As I grew older, I came to understand the kind of busywork he meant, either self-inflicted or assigned, but with a shared intent: make nothing look like something. Productivity that must lead us to happiness. Even our free time feels useless if we haven’t spent it actively relaxing. Resting is resistance too, I’ve heard.

While I’m writing, I hear the sound of tinkling plates inside my kitchen drawer. A four-legged creature with a tail is trying to free itself. Should I liberate it or wait until the sound stops? Obsessively looking for a way out where there is none, the mouse will eventually capitulate to the inevitable. The rat is racing. I wish it would stop so I could focus. I wish it wouldn’t, so I don’t have to deal with the consequences.

The eyes, just like the mind, love repetition, like a house of cards that breaks the rules of using them to their intent, but still sticks to the same building pattern time and again. When we play, we don’t break rules, we invent new ones. I’m playing with a purpose still unclear, sticking to no plan, working on my house of cards. Will it stand or will it crumble? Just like anything worth building, it could easily fall to pieces. Life interrupts unpredictably, but hopefully: ça tombe bien.