Orbitals Gallery — Inspiration and Development
These paintings capture dancers and acrobats spinning, falling, and floating through space, exploring dynamic body language in motion. Each work freezes the fluid tension of human bodies suspended within fragmented universes. The series began after an extended collaboration with Fred Deb, organizing circus artists’ movements into polyptych paintings.
The first piece, Body Language — Circus Movements acquired by the town of Vitry-Châtillon, depicts four distinct movements: horizontal and vertical spins, lateral walking on a hand-held rope, and a spin during aerial silks. A second large painting, created for a Millennium Dome project, Body Language included four additional movements: a tightrope walker crossing the canvas, a pirouette, a breakdancer’s head spin, and a trapeze artist’s to-and-fro motion. This piece was later acquired by Taiwan University Museum of Modern Art.
To deepen the study of movement, Fred and I used a spinning belt to analyze motion in all three spatial dimensions. This led to my early Orbitals series, featuring four movements by two circus artists captured in full 3D, inspired by Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic motion studies.
The series evolved into complex compositions with multiple overlapping movements, such as Flip and spatial choreographies of falling figures like Falling in Unison.