ARTIST STATEMENT
Vlad Pocol's practice originates in an act of recovery. While training as a lawyer in Geneva, a painting he had made in the manner of Gerhard Richter fell from a shelf and was destroyed. Rather than discard it, he took an oyster knife to the ruined surface and, beneath the wreckage, discovered a language entirely his own. That founding gesture, refusing loss, reclaiming form from collapse, has governed his work ever since.
Pocol builds surfaces of extreme material density. Oil is applied in thick, seismic ridges with a palette knife; concrete and epoxy are fused into the canvas; textile mosaics are assembled into topographic fields. He creates and mixes his own pigments, ensuring that no colour can be exactly reproduced, each shade carrying the singularity of its making. The excess is deliberate. Raised in Switzerland by a family of Romanian political refugees in conditions of scarcity, he responds with accumulation, not as indulgence but as an insistence that more can be drawn from what remains.
His work maps territories that do not yet exist. The recurring topographic lines, the vibrating ridges, the fragmented grids of his textile pieces are not depictions of landscape but constructions of place, an internal geography shaped by displacement across Switzerland, Paris, and the Arabian Peninsula. Having found in the Gulf a spiritual proximity to Levantine roots he never directly inherited, Pocol works at the threshold between belonging and foreignness, building through material what cannot be resolved through origin. Migration, in his practice, is not only geographical or political but emotional and spiritual, a daily process of becoming.
Light operates in his work as an unseen collaborator, made visible only through the way it meets texture and relief. Colour carries symbolic weight informed by lived experience: green as hope during a mother's illness, black as depth after encountering Soulages at the Fondation Gianadda. Each series extends the central inquiry through a different substrate. The oil paintings condense emotional strata into geological form. The sculptures in metal, concrete, and resin test the tension between weight and fragility. The textile installations translate the same cartographic impulse into woven and assembled surfaces, introducing architecture and collective memory. Across media, the method remains constant: the territory is not found but made, not inherited but constructed, one layer at a time.
