Group Photo (self-portait)

Medium format film photograph / Final act of performance

2023

“The Elbow Room”, Cambewell College of Art, South London

My paintings serve as transcriptions of personal experience and reflections on primitive, modern and recent iconographies and modes of representation. I’m interested in borrowing formal modernist languages in the hopes of making works that can transmit affective qualities and, at the same time, suggest narrative overtones. In other works, however ‘purely formal’ or ‘abstract’ a work might be, I carefully look to come across marks and colors that may point as signals suggesting a space or story beyond the flat surface and into a specific, haptic memory embedded somewhere else, into the viewer’s personal experience. I usually start working in paintings with no preconceived images or ideas but rather with a few parameters that can promote a space for indeterminacy. Like some of the more mystically inclined surrealists (Arp, Ball, Ernst amongst others) I believe in playing with chance as a method of tuning in with hidden universal networks beyond the rational grasp.

I view landscape as a fluid and yet traditional language that fosters ambiguity when interpreting our shared world. Finally and more generally, I think of the act of painting as a process of healing by which we can both purge and give form to troubling thoughts, and ease a numb or overcharged body. The output confronts us with ourselves and others basically through a sensuous, color and form coded language, giving way to our human need to interpret the traces we leave behind as charged vessels of meaning.