This Australian stay marks the culmination of an international trajectory set in motion nearly three years ago in New York, following an evening on Broadway around the musical “New York, New York,” whose stimulating energy inspired this project.

The cycle gradually took shape around twelve cities distributed across four geographical groups:

• three European cities: selection still in progress

• three American cities: New York, Los Angeles, Miami

• three Far Eastern cities: Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo

• three cities from the rest of the world: Dubai, Doha, Sydney

The paintings of the CITIES project, currently in the sketching and preparation phase, will be based on photographic canvases on which acrylic interventions, notably dots, will be applied.

The use of the dot in painting spans different traditions, both historical and geographical. In resonance with our current Australian context, let us begin with this country, cradle of one of the oldest graphic cultures in the world, that of the Aboriginal peoples, for whom the dot constitutes a fundamental element of their visual vocabulary.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Vassily Kandinsky established the foundations of an abstract language in which the dot and form become active units, organising pictorial space according to principles comparable to those of musical composition.

Several contemporary artists have made the dot an autonomous visual language, notably the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, whose immersive installations have profoundly shaped the international visual imagination.

In very different registers, the dot also runs through twentieth-century modern visual culture, from the mechanical patterns of Roy Lichtenstein to the repetitive series of Damien Hirst, where repetition becomes system.

Alongside dots of different sizes and colours, perforations and cuts occupy a central place in several series of Jean-Claude Bossel’s encrypted paintings, while sometimes retaining a playful dimension, as a nod to Serge Gainsbourg and “Le Poinçonneur des Lilas”.

In the history of modern art, these gestures found radical expression in artists such as Lucio Fontana, whose slashes and perforations transformed the pictorial surface into an open space, linking matter, gesture and depth.

More recently, during our visit to Art Basel Qatar, an installation at the Sprüth Magers gallery stand particularly struck us: the hole, the opening and the pierced surface asserted a strong physical presence.

Our own research into the encrypted use of dots and holes has led, among other outcomes, to the production SIXTIES FANTASIES, completed in January 2026.

Comprising sixty paintings, six of which have already been acquired in Switzerland, distributed across five series of twelve works, this production is structured around emblematic figures of the 1960s and their contemporary resonances: Serge Gainsbourg, Brigitte Bardot, Gunther Sachs, Jane Birkin.

In the work of Swiss artist and mathematician Jean-Claude Bossel, these formal elements, dots, holes, rhythms, are not merely visual motifs.

They become meaningful signs, fully articulated in the diptych LET’S GO.

In this diptych, variations in perforations and colours graphically translate the digits 0 and 1 of the binary system, integrated into the mathematical encryption process CODE BACH.

Thus, elementary forms drawn from an immediately recognisable visual vocabulary become the supports of a complex language linking art, mathematics and cryptography.