ART & THOUGHT
Can the Creative Act Restore a Measure of Freedom to Us?
A Reflection by Marie Dernoncourt — 2026
Before the first line, the first note, the first sentence or the first movement, something is already acting within us.
We arrive with a history, an education, a culture, learning, habits and a particular way of looking at the world. Even what we call our spontaneity does not arise from nothing.
I use the word conditioning here in a broad sense: acquired representations, reactions and behaviours that guide the way we perceive, judge and act without our always being aware of them.
Not all conditioning is a prison. We need to learn, receive and construct ourselves through contact with others. A language, a technique or a tradition may limit certain possibilities, but they also give us the means to think, transmit and create.
The problem begins when what influences us becomes invisible and eventually presents itself as an indisputable truth.
Can the creative act interrupt this automatism? Can it restore a measure of freedom to us?
By freedom, I do not mean absolute independence. I mean the possibility of suspending an automatic response, examining several paths and consciously participating in one’s own choice.
Nor will I seek to decide who deserves the title of artist. That word guarantees neither creativity nor the value of a work. I am interested in the creative act in a broad sense, while observing it more particularly within artistic practices.
What Acts Before Us
No one creates from nothing.
The person who creates belongs to a time, uses inherited tools and forms, and acts from a singular experience. These influences nourish creation, but they can also reduce what we allow ourselves to consider when they are no longer questioned.
A way of working may become recognisable and coherent. But what was first a discovery may turn into habit. Fidelity to an enquiry then risks being confused with the repetition of what one already knows how to do.
A practice remains alive when it can still be questioned by the person who pursues it.
Am I still choosing this gesture, or is it beginning to choose for me?
Freedom does not begin when every influence disappears. It begins when we can recognise what guides our decisions.
The Space Yet to Be Decided
The creative act removes neither constraints nor judgement. It opens a space for experimentation.
When what we do is not immediately subjected to personal, social or economic expectations that seek to determine its value or outcome in advance, several possibilities become accessible again.
It becomes possible to try without knowing exactly what will be retained. A direction may be pursued, transformed or abandoned. Intention itself is not always clear at the beginning: it may become more precise through the work.
An external expectation does not necessarily destroy creation. A commission, a rule or a material limitation may provoke invention. They become confining when they fix the entire outcome or leave no genuine decision to the person creating.
Creation does not therefore require the abolition of judgement. It can prevent a verdict reached too quickly from closing the experience before it has begun.
To create is to encounter a space in which not everything has yet been decided for us.
This freedom guarantees no success. It allows another possibility to be genuinely tested.
What the Gesture Can Reveal
There is often a gap between what we intended to accomplish and what appears.
Material resists. A word shifts the meaning of a sentence. A sound transforms the balance of a composition. A movement produces an effect different from the one sought. Reality does not automatically confirm our intention.
Our response to this gap can make certain automatisms perceptible. Will we force the outcome to resemble the initial plan? Destroy what escapes us? Accept any accident on the pretext that it is creative? Or observe what has actually appeared before deciding?
It would be excessive to claim that a personality can be read directly in a colour, form or gesture. None of these elements possesses a universal psychological meaning. The work does not provide a diagnosis of the person creating it.
It can nevertheless confront them with their way of acting when the outcome partly escapes what they had foreseen.
I noticed this recently while photographing my paintings. One of them seemed to find its place among the others. Once photographed and viewed from a distance, something no longer held. The image did not prove that the work was bad, but it interrupted my habitual way of seeing it. I set it aside.
The change of viewpoint had made perceptible a discordance that daily proximity no longer allowed me to distinguish.
The creative act does not therefore necessarily explain who we are. It can show us how we react when what exists does not entirely correspond to what we wanted.
The New Prisons of Art
Art does not emancipate by nature.
Because it acts upon emotions, symbols and the imagination, art can shift conditioning just as it can give it a more seductive form. It can question power or glorify it, open the gaze or discreetly direct what should be admired, desired or believed.
The intensity of an aesthetic emotion proves neither the truth of a discourse nor its moral value.
The market, recognition and the gaze of others are not necessarily incompatible with creation. They become limiting when the work is conceived solely to confirm an expectation, maintain an image or reproduce what has already succeeded.
A singularity may become a brand. A rebellion may become a posture. An enquiry may become a formula.
Systematically doing the opposite does not guarantee freedom either. Breaking with a habit solely to prove that one is changing still allows that habit to decide the direction.
The viewer also comes to the work with expectations and categories. They may immediately decide that it is beautiful, empty, easy or incomprehensible. If they suspend this first verdict, they do not automatically become free, but they give themselves the possibility of distinguishing what they perceive from what they expected to see.
The opposite of a compliant judgement is not systematic refusal. It is a judgement capable of observing, questioning and correcting itself.
A Freedom That Must Always Be Reclaimed
We never free ourselves completely from conditioning. We can recognise certain automatisms, shift certain habits and refuse certain injunctions, but we never stand entirely outside what has shaped us.
Awareness is not always enough to transform our actions. We also seek security, belonging and the comfort of what we know. Between what we understand and what we can change lie our constraints, our relationships and the consequences of our decisions.
Freedom is therefore not a definitive conquest. It is a fragile capacity that must be exercised regularly.
In my work, cubes, traces, material, white and lines of tension now constitute a vocabulary. I do not know how long it will remain. I try to recognise the moment when a form is still necessary and the moment when it begins to become a habit.
For me, the threshold represents the moment when a conclusion can still be suspended. The passage promises no outcome. It simply indicates that another direction remains possible.
Creating contributes profoundly to my equilibrium. Creation does not separate me from reality: it gathers together what might become dispersed within me. It preserves a space in which not everything has already been thought, judged and decided.
What thinks for us is not always an identifiable authority. It is also our habits, our fears and the judgements we have repeated until we confuse them with our own voice.
Creation does not make them disappear. It can allow us to hear them.
Art does not abolish walls. It can make them visible — and sometimes that is how a passage begins.
© 2026 Marie Dernoncourt — touscreateurs.eu — All rights reserved.
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