Painting Sensation | Treeskulltown — Subrealist Oil Paintings

Painting Sensation

Portrait of the Figural — Subrealist oil paintings
Palette-knife impasto, haptic vision and the form before form.

Unnumbered pieces

The Flayed Figure of Intention (Subrealist Portrait of Jerry Saltz)

The metabolism of a gaze

Oil on canvas · dimensions to be completed

A portrait that refuses resemblance in favour of metabolism: the critic's gaze digested and returned as matter. Sinuous organic lines travel across a white ground, and the impasto rises like skin pulled from its expected shape. Here Merleau-Ponty's embodied gesture meets Lyotard's figural, where the image disrupts the discourse that would contain it. Deleuze's haptic diagram governs the surface. The eye does not read the face; the hand-like gaze touches it, and what intention hides beneath appearance is laid bare.

#Figural#HapticDiagram

Subrealist oil painting portrait of Jerry Saltz with raised impasto, sinuous organic lines on white canvas, haptic texture and physical gesture.

Self Portrait (Experience of Subrealism)

Human alchemy and the form before form

Oil on canvas · dimensions to be completed

I do not paint what you appear to be. I lend you my hands to translate what you truly are. This self-portrait is the first act of that exchange: raw psychic matter pressed into thick flesh tones and spilling beyond the frame. Nothing here is commissioned; it is a human alchemy, in which the form before form takes shape under the knife. Welcome to the experience of Subrealism, where the painter becomes a translator of presence rather than a recorder of surface.

#SelfPortrait#ProtoForm

Subrealist self-portrait oil painting with heavy impasto, organic drips extending beyond the canvas frame, textured flesh tones and raw psychic matter.

Seeing What Is Inside from the Outside

Ce qui est à l'intérieur se voit à l'extérieur

Oil on canvas · dimensions to be completed

A protean profile dissolves into flesh-toned pastel swirls, neither fully face nor fully landscape. The canvas condenses a decade of mastery followed by a decade of deliberate deconstruction: skill learned, then unlearned, until only la forme avant la forme remains. Knife-laid impasto makes the interior visible on the exterior, so the inner life becomes a tactile relief. The profile keeps changing under the viewer's attention, refusing any fixed identity.

#Impasto#ProtoForm

Portrait of the Figural — Pieces I to X

Piece No. I — Doubt

Matter as genesis

Oil on cotton canvas · Jésus format · 75 × 55 cm

The cycle opens with raw potential, before any figure has agreed to appear. Doubt is treated as a creative force: pigment gathers, hesitates, and thickens without resolving into a subject. The palette knife leaves ridges that read as questions held in relief. Nothing is represented, everything is possible. In the haptic register, the viewer senses the canvas as a field of beginnings, a surface where matter itself is still deciding what it will become.

#Doubt#Genesis#Impasto#Subrealism

Piece No. I Doubt, Subrealist oil painting of raw impasto matter before figuration, haptic genesis on cotton canvas.

Piece No. II — Duality

Collision of energies

Oil on cotton canvas · 55 × 45 cm

Two energies meet and refuse to merge. The impasto becomes a battlefield, each ridge the trace of a force pushing against its opposite. This is a diagram of friction rather than a depiction of conflict: tension is made physical, readable by touch before sight. Duality here is not a problem to be solved but the engine of the work, the heat generated when contrary movements share one surface and neither gives way.

#Duality#HapticDiagram#Impasto#Subrealism

Piece No. II Duality, Subrealist oil painting of colliding energies in thick impasto, a haptic diagram of friction on canvas.

Piece No. III — The Body in the City Where the Soul Lies Bare

The mirror-work

Oil on cotton canvas · Jésus format · 75 × 55 cm

The city absorbs bodies; the painting returns them. Conceived as a mirror-work, this piece stages the tension between urban absorption and an exposed soul. The act of painting is performative: each gesture is both reflection and confession. Surfaces of dense matter hold the city's pressure, while openings in the impasto let something raw show through. The viewer meets their own body in the canvas, stripped of the protective noise of the street.

#Body#City#MirrorWork#Subrealism

Piece No. III The Body in the City Where the Soul Lies Bare, mirror-like Subrealist oil painting with heavy impasto and exposed flesh tones.

Piece No. IV — Invisible

Manifestation through withdrawal

Oil on cotton canvas · Jésus format · 75 × 55 cm

Here painting proceeds by erasure. Nude pinks and chalky whites are laid down and partly withdrawn, so that presence appears through what is taken away. The invisible is not absent; it is felt in the thinned passages and the quiet ridges the knife leaves behind. A work about disappearance as a way of showing, it asks the eye to slow down until vision becomes close to touch.

#Invisible#Erasure#Haptic#Subrealism

Piece No. IV Invisible, Subrealist oil painting in nude pinks and chalky whites, erasure as haptic impasto on cotton canvas.

Piece No. V — Nevermind Flower

Emergence of the figural

Oil on cotton canvas · Jésus format · 75 × 55 cm

After doubt and friction, something blooms. Solar yellows and aerial blues push upward in dense strokes, and the figural begins to emerge: not a flower described, but the force of flowering, the élan vital in pigment form. The title shrugs off worry with tenderness. The impasto catches light like petals catch air, and the canvas feels less painted than grown, a surface carried by its own rising energy.

#Figural#Xanthopsia#Impasto#Subrealism

Piece No. V Nevermind Flower, Subrealist oil painting with solar yellows and aerial blues, the figural emerging in thick impasto.

Piece No. VI — Calling for the Spirit

Invocation of breath in its primal state

Oil on cotton canvas · Jésus format · 75 × 55 cm

An invocation made visible. A cerulean halo opens around a single point of condensation where matter gathers as if answering a call. The painting works like breath before speech: pre-verbal, rhythmic, almost audible. The knife builds a small, dense core and lets the surrounding colour thin into air. To look is to inhale; the canvas holds the moment just before spirit takes a form.

#Breath#Spirit#Impasto#Subrealism

Piece No. VI Calling for the Spirit, Subrealist oil painting with a cerulean halo and a point of condensation in heavy impasto.

Piece No. VII — Le Souffle / The Breath

Imprint of vital rhythm

Mixed media · Jésus format · 75 × 55 cm

Organic black calligraphic marks cut across a ground of pastel impasto, recording the rhythm of a single breath. The line is not writing but pulse: it accelerates, hesitates and releases. Against the soft, powdery colour, the black gesture reads as the body's signature, an imprint of living rhythm. Le Souffle turns respiration into relief, so that the viewer follows the painter's breath with their own eyes and hands.

#LeSouffle#Rhythm#MixedMedia#Subrealism

Piece No. VII Le Souffle, The Breath, mixed media Subrealist painting with organic black calligraphic marks over pastel impasto.

Piece No. VIII — My Soul Destroys the Darkness

Luminous conquest

Oil on cotton canvas · Jésus format · 75 × 55 cm

A pulsating core of flesh tones splits a dark ground from within. The light here is not an external source but something produced by the matter itself, pushed outward in thick, warm ridges. The darkness is not denied; it is cleaved, opened and made to frame the glow. This is a luminous conquest felt through the body: heat, density and radiance condensed into a single, insistent centre.

#Light#Soul#Impasto#Subrealism

Piece No. VIII My Soul Destroys the Darkness, Subrealist oil painting with a pulsating core of flesh tones cleaving dark backgrounds in impasto.

Piece No. IX — Curling Up in a Cocoon of Positivity

Matter as regeneration

Oil on cotton canvas · Jésus format · 75 × 55 cm

A chrysalis of vibrant pigments folds around itself, offering grounding and protection. Positivity is treated as a material practice: layers wrapped, pressed and warmed until they form a shelter. The impasto curves like a held body, soft in colour yet dense in structure. Regeneration happens inside this enclosure, slowly and without witness, and the canvas invites the viewer to rest within its colour before anything new emerges.

#Regeneration#Cocoon#Impasto#Subrealism

Piece No. IX Curling Up in a Cocoon of Positivity, Subrealist oil painting of a chrysalis of vibrant pigments in protective impasto.

Piece No. X — Isolated Haptic Genesis

Silence against density

Oil on cotton canvas · Jésus format · 75 × 55 cm

A matte terracotta field holds absolute silence, and at its centre a dense, sculptural island of paint asserts itself. The contrast is the subject: emptiness measured against mass, stillness against accumulated gesture. Isolation here is a condition of birth rather than loneliness, a clearing in which haptic form can begin. The central relief begs to be touched, and the quiet ground makes every ridge audible.

#HapticGenesis#Silence#Impasto#Subrealism

Piece No. X Isolated Haptic Genesis, Subrealist oil painting with a dense sculptural impasto island on a matte terracotta background.

The Witness — Haptic Isolation

Triptych in progress

Piece No. XI — The Witness I: Shadow of Ubu

Immobile patriarchal presence

Oil on canvas · Triptych, part 1 · dimensions to be completed

An immobile presence dominates the canvas, a grotesque mass of impasto recalling Ubu's swollen authority. The figure does not act; it watches, and its weight confines everything around it. Paint piles into a heavy, almost sculptural bulk, and the haptic space tightens until the viewer feels hemmed in. The first witness embodies power as stillness, the shadow cast by a patriarchal gaze that never needs to move.

#TheWitness#Triptych#HapticIsolation#Subrealism

Piece No. XI The Witness I Shadow of Ubu, Subrealist oil painting of a grotesque impasto mass, patriarchal presence and haptic confinement.

Piece No. XII — The Witness II: The Threshold

Transitional haptic boundary

Oil on canvas · Triptych, part 2 · dimensions to be completed

The second panel is a passage. A haptic boundary separates isolation from collective sensation, and the impasto thins and loosens as it approaches the edge. Where the first witness confined, this one opens a way through. The threshold is not crossed here; it is felt, a tactile line between solitary presence and shared experience. The viewer stands on that line, and the surface holds both what is left behind and what lies ahead.

#TheWitness#Triptych#Threshold#Subrealism

Piece No. XII The Witness II The Threshold, Subrealist oil painting of a transitional haptic boundary between isolation and collective sensation.