Bio

I started working on this project during the first lockdown: the experience of the pandemic and the fear of the body it left, led me to thinking that such a deadly disease must have taught us unspoken lessons learnt through fear.

While researching the Aids epidemic, I came across Hannah Arendt's concept of dark times and her unpacking of Heidegger's oxymoron "the light of the Public darkens everything". Arendt speaks of darkness as acts of speech that hide, distort and trivialise the truth, alienating people from the world they live in and belong to. Arendt's definitions of dark times and darkness accurately suited the communication surrounding Aids (how news were divulgated, hidden, simplified, distorted and used for political purposes), and the darkness that followed not only because of politics of the disease.
At first I focused on visual metaphors related to Aids, then I turned towards the role of sex for gay people as a liberating, self affirming, and unapologetic force. My interest for metaphors (and their intrinsic value in gay history) switched towards finding the right painterly mechanics to reproduce erasure, complexity, multiple realities, transience, and sex.
I am fascinated with 1970-1980's New York history, a time when major political, societal and financial changes started to shape the future in a totally different direction – and in which Aids played a big part. I look particularly into cruising and sexual revolution, into the appropriation of the piers as cruising ground, the opportunities these offered to disenfranchised gay men in terms of participation, intimacy and community. The piers, the industrial ruins around the Hudson river, were a fortress of beauty and mythology where the heteronormative society had no say.
Unlike other minorities, gay people aren't born and raised within a community of peers, they have to find their own kind outside, and older generations have historically played a crucial part in the upbringing of the new generations. The AIDS crisis, however, interrupted that inter-generational dialogue that had offered guidance and security to the young for centuries.

My practice enables me to connect with those lost generations of fathers, as well as with my lost future, with a feeling of being late to the party. It allows me to appreciate and reflect on the resulting sense of loss and dislocation as I flick through images from a past I envisioned to belong to, but was never part of, and as I strive to understand what changed – particularly in relation to the body, and its proximity to other bodies.

My source material is archival, and it's essential for me to understand its history to connect with the atmosphere I want for a painting. Once I'm set on an image, size and composition, I create a smoother surface with reduced tooth that enhances the tactile qualities of oils and gives the painting a skin that is not dictated by the texture of the canvas. I see this as an act of resistance and rebellion – refusing the given texture and creating my own makes me feel like I'm not complying with something I don't entirely like. This also allows me to enter a fictional realm in which I can recall the past and its opportunities, what it would have felt like to be part of it; it also allows me to acknowledge the immateriality of the experience, the transparency and smoothness of the glass through which I access the Internet to look at my sources.

I mostly work wet on dry, in glazes and in negative. Glazing forces me to embed and record time, because every layer and brush-mark will remain visible; plus it allows me to cancel, hide or overlap images to produce a complexity of meaning that reflects the operations of narrating and historicising facts from the near past. I often use erasers to produce an image by removing colour from the background. My aim is to find mechanical and painterly metaphors for the concepts implied in the process of divulgating history – which often involves simplifying complex events, creating smokescreens, erasing layers, subcultures and identities, and other political decisions that alter the truth to meet the narrator's ideals or agenda. At the same time, my process produces imperfections and asperities that somehow break free from the screen and set the paintings apart from digital images.