• Artist’s works are presented on the Galerie Bonnard website, as well as on www.1stdibs.com
• Works are available at the Arcadia Gallery New York, USA on www.arcadiacontemporary.com
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Artist’s statement

In my artistic practice, I explore the limits of the portrait genre. I actualize the old pictorial tradition in new systems of knowledge, in fundamentally different worldview perspectives. The subject of my research is relationships.

I often refer to a paired or group portrait, and even in a solitary image I accentuate the presence of the silent interlocutor outside the canvas. I make portraits in which there is always a reference to the other. Because only in another’s gaze, through a prism, can the subject be assembled into a coherent image. Because otherwise a portrait would be an empty shell, a set of individual external features. The living image holds on to this reciprocity from outside, as if outside the gaze, outside the touch or coexistence, the subject would disintegrate, and with it the whole picture would go astray. In this way I make sense of one of the most traumatic discoveries with which the history of the twentieth century is stitched, a discovery at the intersection of psychoanalysis and semiotics: the lack of a once and for all given, fixed integrity of the human self. In the interconnectedness I express the necessary search for a reliable support to define, to answer the question “who am I?”

When I moved to Germany a few years ago, I discovered for the first time the freedom of relationship and personal becoming. It is fundamentally important for me to show that the lack of a stable anchoring of the subject to a definition is not so much a misfortune as a potential freedom of choice, a potential multiplicity of forms and ways of actualizing the self. In my work, I try to capture situations, moments in which a person in relationship to another discovers again and again the possibility of becoming.

The conscious choice of my characters is love in its multiple forms and manifestations. It is important for me to express technically easy ephemerality, freedom, the possibility of partial dissolution in each other. In my expressive style of writing I use gradients, connections, voids and tense color fields. These techniques go back to early modernism, to the tradition in which painting exists on the border with graphics, as if unintentionally passing into the realm of ephemeral matter, understatement. Such painting simultaneously refers the viewer beyond the canvas and signifies the materiality of the canvas, the flatness of the picture, the illusory nature of all life-simulation.

By combining the dense materiality of volumes and semi-abstract patches of impeccable color I create an image as if inscribed into a magnetic field, into the limits of a vibrating air environment. The dynamics of volume and abstraction reveals the way painting becomes itself – through the effort, through the contradiction of the real and the illusory. The color fields cut through the conventional semiotics of the portrait, opening the emptiness, a breakthrough into the external, unmarked Real.

According to the thought of Georges Didi Huberman, the voids, the gaps are a sign of displacement, of breathing, of life and mutual tension. It is as if the painting is able to meet its gaze with the viewer, to challenge his primary right to look. In addressing this paradigm of painting, I work in the aesthetic mode described by Jacques Rancière – erasing hierarchies of form and content, eluding once and for all given definition. The mimetic function of the portrait is displaced by the event that unfolds within the encounter between the work and the viewer. It is the viewer who is the unchanging other in whose perception art is able to exist.

When the portrait was secularized, framed as a genre and interpreted as the prerogative of the elite, the image became frozen in the semblance of a tribal coat of arms or seal. The portrayed subject with his views, profession, position, and complexion was paused. There was no room in the portrait for the separation of the sensual in common space-time. In confused, bewildered modernism, the sensual ceases to be an outcast, love is freed from hierarchies. The problematic of my work goes back to this decisive, but never fully realized, turn. I seek to portray a love like Franz Kafka’s love for Milena. In such love there is always an understatement, it is excruciating because of the impossibility of complete immersion, of absolute unity of living beings. This system of relations is also relevant for the viewer’s perception: my characters wear neutral facial expressions; neither I nor my viewer have the opportunity to penetrate their souls, to fully share their experiences. The manner of writing is only an indirect sign that there is a storm behind the detached countenance.

I problematize the artistic image in time. What matters most to me is the story of the person. The way the past and the future collide in a caught moment, in this infinitely extended, frozen present. The way another self is born in an instant. In the shortest temporal interval of “now” the human finds a chance to become, but often does not have time to do it. Painting is the only thing that protects them from non-existence, brings them back to life, to the oscillation between two temporalities: the internal history and the external time of the viewer’s perception.