About

Artist statement

My paintings question what we accept as real by default.

In them, familiar figures turn up where they are not quite at home. My figures stand for sentient beings in the world, even when they are not flesh and blood. Between figure and world runs a dialogue with a false bottom: the world tries to absorb the figure, and the figure quietly undermines it. I call such a figure submersive: subversive and submerged. From this tension come three questions I leave open: What is given to us? What are we told is real? What lies below the surface?

Each painting begins with a flash, which I spend months distilling into a clear concept. I draw on my own photographs, screenshots of films and artworks, travel, and other cultures and religions. I once looked for beauty only in nature; now I also find it in the banality of the wholly artificial, such as children’s toys, sacred statuettes and ceramic figurines.

Painting, for me, is a ritual that begins long before the first brushstroke. I build my own stretchers, stretch the canvas and prime it the way the old masters did. The thinking is slow, the painting fast. I paint large-scale oils with wet layers of colour, drips and pigment. Pigment was once stone. In oil it becomes liquid; on canvas, essence. The circle closes.

My paintings are scenes on an uncanny stage, where everything is a shade too real. Through cracks in the scenery comes a pinch of the backstage behind what we call reality.

I compose scenes that refuse to settle into one reading: part picture, part theatre, part reality.