The Road Beyond Maps

I have always been drawn to the way an image stays with us after the thing itself has gone.

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Memory is never a faithful witness. Over time, some details fade while others grow larger than they ever were. Into the gaps between them, imagination quietly moves in. A place we once knew turns into somewhere else. A face shrinks to a gesture or the turn of a shoulder. Something we only dreamed comes to feel as familiar as something we have actually lived.

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The paintings in The Road Beyond Maps come from that unsettled ground between remembering and inventing. I work without photographs or any other visual references. Each image grows from what I remember, what I imagine, and what reveals itself only in the act of painting, when the brush finds something the mind had not yet seen.

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For me, imagination is not an escape from reality. It is one of the ways we live inside it. It lets us see what is not in front of us, bring together things that were never meant to meet, and picture something before it exists.

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That is why nothing in these paintings stays still: not the figures, the places, the animals, or the forms. They surface and dissolve, and they shift under the viewer’s gaze. They live in the space between recognition and doubt, where something feels known but cannot quite be named.

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Perhaps this is what remains when the maps run out: the ability to imagine another way forward.

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— Denis Sarazhin

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