Philippe Triconnet — Journal

In an earlier piece , I suggested that style may be less something we choose than something that slowly appears. A trace left by the way we look. The same subjects returning. The same light. The same distance from the world. Over time, a body of work begins to hold together. That coherence matters. It gives a portfolio its shape, and slowly creates a visual world. But perhaps it also creates an expectation. My own work has gradually settled into black and white. Not as a rule, but because it became the most natural way for me to strip a scene back to structure, light, silence, and presence. A colour photograph placed among those images would not simply be different. It might feel out of place. And then a small question appears: Am I leaving it aside because it is weaker — or because it no longer fits the work people expect from me? Henri Matisse once wrote: “An artist must never be a prisoner even of himself, a prisoner of a style, a prisoner of a reputation, a prisoner of good for...