I paint on the reverse side of raw linen. While I work, I do not see the painting – I only see what I apply, not what arrives. Pigment and binder travel through the weave, and the linen has its say: its density, its irregularities, the amount of time and water.

Because I cannot correct, I have to prepare with precision. My work resembles an experimental setup: I wear gloves, mix pigment and water in cups to exact ratios, dose with syringes, tilt the canvas so that paint runs where gravity pulls it. I make decisions constantly – but without seeing what they do on the other side. And nothing can be taken back.

A painting takes shape over time, in layers. Once a layer has dried, I turn the canvas and look at what has happened. Then I decide on the next intervention – again from the back, again without sight. It is the rhythm of the experiment: act, wait, observe, act again. The moment of recognition never coincides with the moment of making.

The title of the series is older than the paintings. Symptoms of life is what I have called, since the beginning of my strolling research, the things I encounter along the way: everything that lives and happens leaves traces – signs, patterns, imprints. The world is full of them. Most of these traces are too complex to decipher; but in principle they would allow conclusions, patterns, perhaps regularities. It is a similar movement by which science draws knowledge from observation – Darwin read beaks and fossils as symptoms of a process no human being has ever witnessed.

The paintings in this series turn that observation around: instead of merely reading traces, I set up conditions under which they come into being. What appears on the front is not an image of my intention but the symptom of a process with many participants – the pigment, the water, the weave, gravity, time, and me. What remains on the linen are islands of colour: dense cores, fringed edges, runs directed by gravity – forms of the kind that otherwise grow, seep or settle. The paintings come into being through me, with me, and also without me.

All of this belongs to a practice I have called strolling since 2016: being underway without a fixed destination, perceiving without premature judgement, giving up control in order to discover rather than confirm. Strolling also means testing the models in my head against reality. For our conceptions, too, are models – abstract, full of assumptions, measured against reality at only a few points. A good model allows predictions; and it keeps deviating, because it is a model and not reality itself. The symptoms are my points of measurement.

At the end stands the real decision: accept or discard. Not every painting survives. What remains has passed a test stricter than any correction – for nothing here can be corrected.

I have never touched the front of a painting.