Artistic Statement
 
In Intimités arrachées, Mickey Pujolar Leray develops a practice of the image grounded in a paradox: making something appear by removing it. Where pictorial tradition builds through accumulation, the artist works through subtraction. Drawing, inking the surface in black, then slashing, scratching, and tearing it away layer after layer, the surface becomes the site of a gradual revelation. The image is not produced; it is uncovered.
This method calls upon the graphic legacy of Félix Vallotton, whose stark contrasts brought forth the psychological tension of domestic interiors. Here, however, the radical black-and-white is no longer merely a visual language; it becomes a material operation. The sheet is treated as a field of extraction in which the figure emerges through excavation.
The images themselves arise from a hybrid iconographic field: historical architecture, anonymous interiors, fragments of popular culture, and images circulating through the digital sphere. Torn from their original contexts, they are recomposed into an uncertain geography where intimate memory and collective memory converge. Architecture plays a central role: doors, staircases, rooms, and thresholds become the silent structures of an absent presence. 

Within these works, the gaze constantly oscillates between two registers. From a distance, the image stabilizes into an almost photographic legibility. Up close, the surface breaks apart into scars, ruptures, and traces of the gesture. This tension between illusion and materiality reveals what the image usually seeks to conceal: its fragility.
 
Pujolar Leray’s work can thus be read as an archaeology of the contemporary image. In a world saturated with visual flows, where images multiply to the point of erasing their own memory, the artist performs the opposite gesture: he slows their emergence, submitting them to a physical process that exposes both their structure and their vulnerability.
 
Each piece appears as the trace of a place that persists despite its disappearance — a visual imprint suspended between apparition and erasure. In Intimités arrachées, the image does not simply represent a space; it carries its memory.