Bio

The experience of the pandemic and the permanent (or at least long lasting) psychological effects it left in the way we have learnt to fear each other's body as a vehicle of infection, led me to look more into the aids crisis. Such a deadly, ongoing disease, that has claimed almost 40 million lives, yet so forgotten and neglected. So many questions about the political, social, financial aspects of the age of aids - but most importantly what unspoken lessons have we learnt through fear from that experience? I started investigating - and not in search for artistic inspiration.

At that time, I was looking into 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 communication that hide, distort and trivialise the truth and the layers of reality, creating a sense of alienation in the people that make them want to distance themselves from the world they live in and should belong to.

After a year from the beginning of the lockdown, I started seeing Arendt's ideas as a fitting pattern for the years leading to the aids outbreak, and then for the aftermath of the pandemic. I was particularly fascinated with New York's recent history, the White Flight in the middle of the McCarthyism, the near bankruptcy in the 1970's, the gay movement, the golden age of gay adult movies, and the appropriation of the piers as cruising ground.

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I began to grasp the role of the piers as a shelter from the toxic communication surrounding homosexuality and homosexuals, as a playground to build a new self, particularly for disenfranchised men, cross contaminating with the fantasies seen in the early homoerotic magazines and movies.

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At first I focused on visual metaphors related to aids, then I fully delved into the fascination and importance of gay sex. Sex is powerful, liberating, self affirming, and unapologetic. It builds confidence from the most vulnerable core, outside of the fairy tale promises of romance.

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I use the rich sensuousness and transparency of oil paint to represent the eroticism and energy of the years leading to the outbreak of the aids crisis. I strive to render the fascination for dilapidated buildings as cruising ground for gay sex - like the Manhattan piers, their disappearance echoing the disappearance of the men who populated them. My source material comes from online archives where their time overlaps with our time, gaining a ghostly and nostalgic aura, and refusing to fade. I paint these memories and evidence of the past in glazes and glossy layers to encapsulate the layers of time, transience, sexual desire.

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Next by the images from the past I have scenes from contemporary life, from the anonymous buildings I have temporarily inhabited in my nomadic experience. The surfaces in these other cluster of paintings tend to be coarser, the colours bleaker, and the brushwork brisker.

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This project is called GRID, after an acronym which stood for Gay Related Immune Deficiency, the term used to refer to AIDS in the early days of the disease, inferring that gay men were the source of the disease as well as its sole target, and prefiguring the political use of fear-mongering and stigma against homosexuals in the process of urban and social gentrification that followed the riots of the previous decades.

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My practice enables me to consider and understand the resulting sense of loss and dislocation as I wander among images from a past I was never part of, mixed with images of obscure domestic environments from the present that want to be metaphors of inner neglected feelings.

With a feeling of being late to the party, I explore the difference between the past and the present for my community, and try to understand what changed – particularly in relation to the body, and its proximity to other bodies.