I think about my art as a type of reverse engineering. While at first glance, my works may seem of many times and outside of time, they are always grounded in contemporary and local reality.

I usually start with an image that feels “heavier” than others, somehow “off” in time and place despite its contemporary appearance. These are usually images in which I recognize multiple – often competing or incongruent – meanings, significances, histories. So condensed that they become “black holes” of sorts, forming their own gravitational field and affecting everything around them.

 

In my work process, I trace their imagined origin, invoking the visual language and codes through which they were conceived. In a way, I take the image back to the visual world in which it was born, formulated, and disseminated. This is painting that already holds its own history. That takes into account that every painting gesture and choice always carries the world in which it was originally formulated, the place and time that shaped it and continue to reverberate in it.

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By extracting the image from the façade of contemporariness and reimagining it in its “natural” visual language, I bring to the surface the simultaneous presence of ideologies, meanings, values that continue to be at play in our world, even though they were declared dead a long time ago. With that I do not only expose the lingering presence of our histories in our reality, but also wish to point to the transmutation of ideas, the exchange between cultures and place that we construct as competing dichotomies.