Biography
While I started to paint later in life, I am energized by a distinct need to create new cheerful and vibrant worlds in response to years of communistic grey and corporate taupe. Inspired by landscapes, urban moods, science fiction, digital images and macro photography, my paintings are transformational images of emotions and energy twisted by randomness with one result: a new unexpected but somehow familiar universe, a universe that you, the viewer, want to get closer to.
My first act is choosing the color: sometimes one color leads the others, sometimes they come as a democratic group. I love the acrylic paint for its synthetic quality that contrasts with my “organic” tendencies. Acrylic is very decisive: it is either vibrant and clear, creating light and brightening its surroundings or dark, without transparency, building walls where emotions stop and break, become new and unknown. Its drying speed forces me to let go and not over think the process. Therefore, I start working quickly and spontaneously, without hours of examination. The paintings are always experimental till they are not, till the image comes into play and I shift to a slower pace.
It is a disconnection (of the best kind) from the prosaic, and a direct link to the subconscious. I enjoy getting close to the painting, to its textured surface, so when I step back, the image created is a grand surprise and does not always work as an assemble. It does not need to. The target is a space or more than one space where emotions live their unencumbered unique life. Sometimes the spaces help each other flowing together or they contrast each other. The spaces and their dynamic fragment our requirement to have a cerebral understanding of form or narrative. There is no system; there is no story, only spaces in the present moment. And my only mission is to throw a little light on those pieces with the hope of getting the past and the future out of the equation, obliterating the equation. Although the minimal form of lines and patterns calls for the future, the colors call for the past or known existence and their tensed interaction enables the present moment to appear.
In the beginning, I used knives of different forms. The knife restricts the movement around its axis; movements are harsh and decisive giving the painting a very masculine energy: strong and sharp. Over the time, the knives evolved to larger and larger blades until the blade covered the entire surface of the canvas and softened the flow. The slight initial control is lost and the abstraction is stronger: the cut becomes a stretching, the dragging movement larger and larger. Although dragging has become my favorite technique, I still need to “blade” the paint in order to change the energy flow. I work from all direction around the painting as a horizontal surface hoping to diminish form and its restrictions. The paintings still have a bottom and a top and they can be easily interpreted as landscapes. Part of my future challenge is to escape this format and create absolute moments detached from reality.
