About
Artist
Statement
My artistic practice navigates the intersection of classical figurative painting and contemporary sensibilities, with a focus on self-portraiture and surreal reflections. Through themes of nostalgia, loneliness, anxiety, and alienation, I explore the delicate balance between beauty and the grotesque. My process blends painting and photography, beginning with photographic studies that incorporate reflective and distorting materials, such as bendable copper chrome plates, mirrors or magnifying sheets. These materials allow me to fragment and reshape the human form, creating works that transcend physical reality while maintaining an intimate focus on details like jewelry, fabric patterns, and hair as markers of identity. My practice is an inquiry into dualities—the tension between form and formlessness, harmony and dissonance, the ideal and the distorted.
Informed by mythic narratives of love, rupture, and metamorphosis, my work reflects on the paradox of unity through fragmentation. Echoes of ancient tales—where desire and loss intertwine—emerge not as direct representations but as atmospheric undercurrents, lending an eerie, melancholic charge to each composition.
My work reinterprets the timeless beauty of Renaissance and Baroque depictions of Venus, deconstructing their ideals into fragmented, dynamic forms. The bodies I portray are in motion, their fluid lines and vibrant hues inviting viewers into a contemplative space where classical harmony meets contemporary dissonance. The Fragmented Venus series epitomizes my exploration of beauty’s paradoxical nature -its harmony and decay, allure and fragility. Drawing on the philosophies of Freud, Jung, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Byung-Chul Han, I use body distortion as a metaphor for the crises of identity and beauty in modern society. Han’s critique of beauty as a sterilized, consumable spectacle informs my practice, compelling me to restore its depth, tension, and mystery.
By blending classical traditions with modern perspectives, I seek to challenge conventional ideals and evoke emotional and sensory engagement. My work is an attempt to reconcile the eternal allure of classical art with the complexities of contemporary existence, offering viewers a space for reflection and connection.
Through the interplay of distortion and allure, I seek to unsettle the viewer’s perception, inviting contemplation of the liminal space between presence and absence, appearance and dissolution. The grotesque is not a deviation from beauty, but its necessary counterpart—an axis along which meaning is destabilized and reimagined. Each painting is a philosophical proposition: a question of what endures when the surface fractures, and what truths are revealed when the ideal is no longer intact.