Claude Gigons work in various media is about basic material and psychological states that are often expressed as contrasts: compression and dissolution, attraction and repulsion, isolation and interconnection. His series of snowmen takes the abstraction of the human figure reduced to one or two circular shapes as its starting point, and examines moments of transformation: transient figures and substances subject to material change. The modelling of colour and brushstrokes gives these paintings an almost sculptural appearance; forms are separated, compressed or dissolved. Flux and solidity are both equally important to the balance of the image. The artists guiding theme is materiality, but always in relation to the human figure and the psychological dimension of what it means to be human, and frequently with a portion of irony.