The themes of my work often address mortality and the living body, intertwining eroticism with the sacred and mystical, the sacrilegious, the impure, and the abject. I am intrigued by the tension between the sensual or ecstatic body and the ultimate cessation of life – the corpse – prompting questions about what enlivens a body and the vulnerability of existence. There are scenes from my intimate everyday environment – my partner's figure leaning on a radiator on a cold winter morning or sitting alone in a room, shuffling a deck of cards.
Recently, I have moved in a fictional direction, staging scenes with performers who embody strange characters, hybrid creatures or demons acting as ambassadors of absolute Otherness. These fantasies are enigmatic and ambiguous, imbued with a soft and delightful horror. This fabricated horror disrupts the viewer's sense of self as a whole and unified subject, challenging the (illusive?) binary between Self and Other. I photograph these scenes as reference material for paintings, developed first in small-scale works, often similar in size to the printed photographic source. While working on a small scale, I determine the optimal size for a particular painting that allows the theme of my work to resonate with maximum capacity.
I am fascinated by a search for the uncanny within the ordinary in my subject matter, though I occasionally return to still-life settings in my studio, using many objects, found, constructed, and ordinary. This act of "repatriation" to observational painting helps me renegotiate and redefine my relationship with the materiality of painting itself. Often, I feel as if I am getting too close to my subject when I paint, yet this proximity is essential to complete the work in a sensible way. Through the process of prolonged observation, a deeper understanding of what I am looking at emerges. Unexpected things happen when one looks at things for a long time. Under normal conditions, I never quite arrive at seeing anything; it is only when I start to observe and paint that the subject gradually reveals itself. In this way, the painting becomes the tangible manifestation of this perceptual experience.