The North Lake series forms part of a broader exploration of San Francisco as a psychic and poetic space, in conversation with my *Cadastres Exquis* project. While that series mapped the city through surrealist urban writing—merging land registry with exquisite corpse—*The North Lake* turns inward, mapping not the city’s streets but its silences. Where *Cadastres Exquis* traces emotion through fog and architecture and urban grid, *The North Lake* listens for the dream beneath the surface.

Together, these works form an emotional topography of San Francisco—a city of vanishing edges, of memory that disintegrates like trees into water, into sky, into the names we never speak.

“The North Lake does not sleep—
it dreams with open eyes,
an iris of forgotten gold beneath the Gate”

Dissolving into the lake - Trypic 2,73m x 91cm, Acrylic on canvas

The video component of this series overlays that footage with fragments of my surrealist poetry, drawing inspiration from French poets like Paul Éluard and René Char. The words speak of lakes that breathe and mirrors that dream—of trees that disintegrate into birds and smoke, becoming the names of stars never spoken. These poems attempt to speak in the language of water: fluid, shifting, and elusive. They form a lyrical meditation on light, silence, and impermanence.

I also composed an ambient soundscape for the piece, designed to immerse the viewer in a sonic equivalent of the lake’s stillness. The resulting experience—video, sound, poetry—is a portal into a state of drift, a reverie in motion.

The accompanying paintings translate the moving image into stillness. In them, the text is not structured poetry but impressionistic notes—fragments of thought, overheard from within the reverie. These phrases drift between visibility and erasure, often overtaken by translucent layers of pigment, as if memory itself were caught in the act of dissolving. The language hovers at the threshold of legibility, emerging only partially before sinking back into the visual field. In this way, the paintings enact a poetics of disappearance: text becomes texture, meaning becomes murmur. The eye searches, not just to read, but to remember.

The lake listens, Acrylic on canvas 30x30cm

The lake is #1, Dyptic, Acrylic on canvas 120x60cm

The lake is #2, dyptic, Acrylic on canvas 60x30cm

  • Lost path - Acrylic on canvas+washi paper, 40x40cm

  • North Lake 2, acrylic on canvas 40x40cm

  • North_lake #6, Acrylic on canvas, 30x30cm

  • North Lake 2, Acylic on canvas 30x30 cm

  • North Lake V - Acrylic on Canvas 40x40cm

  • L'eau etanche la soif d'innocence, Acrylic on canvas 40x40cm

  • The eye of the lake, Acrylic on canvas, 40x40cm

  • Water is, Acrylic on canvas, 30x30cm

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