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Emmanuel Dilhac's works are spellbinding and intriguing; he is a visionary painter, and an incurable researcher. His exploration of raw and fundamental elements, and his discoveries in the field of prehistoric sounds, music and languages, nourished a long correspondence (several years) with Jean Dubuffet. His painting excludes everything relating to the tensions of the contemporary world; far from being negative, its roots are plunged in mankind's origins and future.

Emmanual Dilhac's research does not represent a historian's analysis but rather a synthesis. His juxtapositions of shapes, signs, and visual narratives reveal germinations, steles, mankind, the sun, and the cosmos: his painting tells a story. In the beginning everything was undifferentiated and muddled in the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms. Out of this world in fusion, the primordial elements are born. Signs and shapes preserve the memory of these origins. The earliest languages, scripts and art forms were abstract. Emmanuel Dilhac's painting is sculpture, his sculpture is also painting, his alphabets are cosmic and vehicles of ancestral memory. His works convey the idea of the fusion and expansion of the universe, corresponding to the key moment when shape became sign and sign became shape. In coming full circle, he plunges us once more into the original universe.

His semiotic research reveals the world's hidden origins. His work treats a whole cosmogony, and creates a spiritual synthesis of mind and matter. Emmanuel Dilhac's painting is spiritual, portraying an emotion that goes beyond abstraction. It is a road less travelled because it is perhaps ahead of its time; it is the path of tomorrow. Emmanuel Dilhac assumes the role of messenger of things that are beyond our reach, of sacred mysteries. His life becomes a broad script, and his reliefs and materials, which are combined with colour and shape, will one day rise up like a song, like a church organ, like a prayer…

M. SCOT, Art critic

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