Madeleine Guiton’s work explores perception as a sensitive and shifting experience.
Inspired by the phenomenological thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, she seeks to capture that fragile moment when seeing is not merely looking, but inhabiting the visible.
Her practice of oil painting on canvas is rooted in observing the world around her, which she captures through photography. She does not aim to faithfully reproduce these images, but to reveal their variations in presence—the subtle transformations that light and time enact upon the visible.
Whether it emanates from a screen or from the passage of daylight, light becomes the true subject of her work: a living, ever-changing substance that constantly alters what we believe we see.
“What interests me is what appears and disappears in the gaze.
Those moments when things are there, and then no longer there—when perception becomes uncertain.”
In her paintings, the visible shifts, fades, or overlaps, as if to remind us that seeing is always an act of interpretation.
Madeleine Guiton probes this ambiguous space between presence and absence, between image and memory.
Each painting thus becomes an experience of looking, an attempt to make the temporality of light and vision perceptible.

Through her work, she invites us to slow down and inhabit perception—to recognize, in the flicker of an image or the nuance of a hue, the very vibration of the living world.