Paintings:

Although purely abstract, the paintings’ fragmented compositions, conflicting perspectives and figure-ground arrangements locked within the paintings’ multiple glazes may call to mind bits of landscape or architectural spaces. Neither prints nor collage techniques, nor photographs, are used in the process. With the use of tools like straight edges and knives, an effect of instant reality is produced and some kind of evidences alluding to places and events appear. It takes time to see through the superimposed layers of the paintings, as it takes time for the eye to conjugate the overlapping fragments. It is only upon closer inspection that the photographic reality falls apart and the painting’s illusion is revealed: the references are only subjective and illusory. One wonders if this experience is collective, or the reverse… something impossible to share, nor memorize.

Process:                                                                                 

Reactions initiate my work. These are discreet, almost invisible reactions that could easily be overlooked if they were not provoked and created on the canvas. I use materials that react with each other, and as they do so, they leave marks of their transformation.  Depending on these materials’ inherent behavior, as a result of either rejection or attraction to each other, life slowly develops on the canvas. Grass seeds come to life, steel turn to rust, dust settles, colonies of mold pervade etc., as all these materials lay on the ground, in the open air. I let nature take it’s course, while I interfere before these materials’ reactions have exhausted all their energy, and, finally, I interrupt the cycle and seal the canvas with layers of rhoplex. The struggle is suspended in full bloom, producing a landscape that reveals the underlying forces of nature: a recording of growth and decay. When these landscapes are looked at closely, one can discern the persisting roots of the seeds still clinging onto the canvas, and the marks of the steel’s vigorous resistance to the corrosive environment it came from. I find something poignant in these silent reactions. They are landscapes stripped to their elementary state, which reveal, in their discreet struggle, an inherent self-consuming urge for subsistence. Something we all know already, but keep forgetting.