Philippe Halaburda
- Anna Lilli Garai
- Nov 11
- 3 min read
Philippe Halaburda is a French-born artist living in New York. He starts his process by walking through cities. He transforms their movement, rhythm, and sounds into abstract compositions. Using paint, tape, yarn, and modular pieces, he creates layered structures that look like maps, capturing both order and randomness. Grids and lines provide a framework for each piece. His works reflect the paths that influenced them, balancing control and flow. In pieces like “Priori Ehurraa,” Halaburda illustrates how cities impact us and how those influences can take on new visual forms.
Q: You often call your works “emotional maps.” What pushed you to start turning movement and city life into abstraction?
A: I began mapping after noticing how a walk holds more than distance; it carries mood, memory, and micro-decisions. Abstraction lets me chart that inner weather. Psychogeography gave me a language for it: how places shape us and how we, in turn, script places. I’m not drawing streets; I’m plotting intensities, where attention spikes, where it drifts, where a color feels like a corner.
Q: When you walk through a city, what usually draws you in first—structure, rhythm, or something more instinctive?
A: Rhythm, then structure. Footsteps, traffic syncopations, overheard fragments, they act like a metronome. Structure arrives later as a counterweight: grids, scaffolds, sight lines. I follow what pulls, not what’s planned.
Q: You use materials like yarn, tape, and LEGO bricks. What kind of logic or feeling guides those choices?
A: Each material is a verb, an action I can feel. Tape draws, interrupts, and enforces; it makes edges, pressure lines, and sudden stops. Yarn connects and sutures; it carries warmth and slack, letting a line breathe or bow like a memory under tension. LEGO is modular logic with childlike audacity, order you can rearrange, a grid that clicks, unclicks, and records decision-making in real time.
I choose tactile truth: the medium must convey the idea. If I need friction or a rigid boundary, I reach for tape; if the piece asks for continuity or repair, it’s yarn; when I want a system that can evolve on the wall, LEGO modules set the tempo. I also listen to the concept of resistance, how a surface pushes back. Acrylic skates; tape bites; yarn drags slightly and casts a shadow that becomes part of the drawing. And there’s site logic: in installations, I pick materials that negotiate the architecture, corners, seams, airflow, so the room collaborates with the map. In the end, the palette isn’t just color; it’s behaviors composed into a language of movement.
Q: In “Priori Ehurraa,” order and chaos seem to coexist. How do you find your way between the two when you paint?
A: I tune them like two notes; chaos and order are not opposites but frequencies that need balance. Chaos brings the pulse: spills, ruptures, off-beat gestures, those minor accidents that carry emotion faster than thought. Order provides gravity: grids, alignments, and the measured pauses that keep the energy from dissolving.
When I paint, I oscillate between the two, introducing disturbance, then editing it down until the composition starts to regulate its own breathing. I stop when it feels neither controlled nor wild but alive. It’s like jazz structure or early constructivist rhythm: clarity born from disruption. What holds it together is attention, the patience to let chaos reveal its internal order and let order accept a little disorder as proof of life.
Q: You return to grids and systems again and again. What keeps that visual language alive for you?
A: Because a grid is never neutral, it’s both promise and pressure. I start strict, then let heat in: overruns of color, small misfits, off-rhythm modules. The grid stays alive when it can drift without losing its spine.
Q: Your work feels in constant motion, even when it’s static. Do you think of the act of making as a kind of movement itself?
A: Yes, making is choreography. Every mark is a trace of motion slowed down just enough to be seen. Gestures stack like steps; the hand plots routes, and the eye doubles back, revising them. I think through rhythm more than form, each line, a phrase in an unfinished dance. The process is not about freezing movement but translating its tempo into visual space.
Sometimes I paint while standing, walking, or circling the work as if it’s breathing back at me. The surface becomes a stage of micro-adjustments: tension, pause, release. I’m as interested in the kinesthetic memory of making as in the final composition, the way the body remembers direction long after the brush lifts.
In the end, I try to compose a city you can traverse with your gaze, where stillness holds the residue of motion.
