Your art is stylish?

I went to see the Gerhard Richter retrospective currently on display (until March 2, 2026) at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris.

If there's one "lesson" to be learned from it, it's once again highlighting the absurdity of the advice that anyone aspiring to become a professional painter will receive sooner or later: "You have to find your style and do nothing else!"

Although my artistic inclinations only emerged four short years ago, I've always felt a certain mistrust towards this type of statement. Looking back, I'll try to objectively explain what underpinned this somewhat instinctive mistrust:

1. In my opinion, the very essence of Art, in its various forms of expression, is precisely to free itself from any dogma or injunction on how the Artist wishes to express themselves; above all, one must know how to listen to oneself, and if the creative instinct takes us in different directions, with completely different styles, this should not be "restrained".
2. Art is based on the loss of control; the artist-painter is not a worker like any other, and instinct plays a primary role where reason and rationality prevail in many other fields.
3. I cannot imagine the practice of visual arts without experimentation and the search for new forms of expression... confining oneself to a single style does not seem compatible with this perpetual exploration and this somewhat experimental aspect of painting.
4. I will finish with a completely personal argument specific to my life journey... before discovering my vocation at forty-eight, people constantly tried to confine me to "categories" which, ultimately, reflected a fragmented and distorted image of my "person" who, through Art, aspires to express themselves in many different ways and forms... I don't think I'm the only Artist to feel this way! 

Despite everything, an artist's "style" or "personal touch" may emerge through long and arduous work, but in my opinion, it is born neither from a conscious will nor from the dictates of the art market, galleries, current trends, or potential buyers... it decides to "emerge" because the artist follows their intuition and relentlessly pursues their own path within their practice, precisely without worrying about "external" dictates that dwell within them and permeate the very core of their being as an artist.

One of my favorite painters, Henri Matisse, said, "An artist should never be a prisoner... neither of himself, nor of his style, nor of his reputation, nor of his success..." 

I think that sums it all up... When you start your artistic journey, you fumble, you search for yourself, you look for what you want to express, what suits you best to express it, and then there are the happy accidents, those that sometimes mean that what you produce with your hands and your mind delights you so much that you start trying to reproduce it, more or less, thinking, "That's my style! People will like it!" 

Later, when you're lucky enough to find your audience, there's a great risk of becoming trapped by what people appreciate about the artist's work...

I believe that at every stage of one's career, one must never give in to the easy way out, resist, and resist again the temptation of one's "safe" bubble where artistic risk-taking is reduced to an absolute minimum.

The Richter exhibition is, in this respect, a powerful argument for a painting that expresses itself in many different ways, disregarding the barrier between the figurative and abstract worlds and echoing the life of an artist who is fully engaged in both his inner and outer worlds.