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Painting Testimony
2006-2010
The relationship between form and space is at the foundation of
the whole painting issue. A form states the perception of its
own existence or its relation to non-existence. Form boundaries
are where the artist’s visual perception of the world is
essentially stamped along with his life attitude and behaviour
towards things.
This bondage presents a part of the society the work belongs
to. Yet, we are not just what arises from our integration into
the system. There is fear in the eyes of children who carry
butterflies already extinct from the planet. Knives stand out
in people’s relationships. Each birth of a fragile newborn baby
is separated by a red line, easily severed. Emily Dickinson
visits Iraq. The paradox of the era. We live the beginning of
the end. Nature is filling up with trash, innocent children are
being killed in Gaza, Mogadiscio, Fallujah; no one reacts, no
one fears.
Painting is the effort to find poetry in the terror of everyday
life, in the savagery of events. Human life has lost its
value. People’s relationships are glaciers and terror, the lack
of understanding creates violence and murders everywhere. A
world terrifyingly wild, ugly, but beautiful too. Painting is a
continuous struggle. A Fight.
This work is founded on the images of today, most originating in
the news, the internet, or videogames. A picture remix of no
limits develops, a fight to recompose fragments. Simple
transfer of the mass picture in the private space of the canvas
is a plastic and conceptual subtraction. Removed from the
familiar background of the media, there on the canvas, it
reveals its falseness. At the same time, deforming
interventions occur. An emotional painting is moulded where the
figure serves as a dramatic presence and visual experience of
this real space.
The artist’s views are confessed through realism proceeding to
political comments. The human face expands to cinematographic
dimensions and is confronted as lyric and dreamlike scenery.
There is realism, and indeed critical realism. A person is not
recorded at random, but consciously, at momentary illustrations
of an action. Often, a face or a situation is marked with an
arrow. An indefinite, hidden or apparent form of someone who
may even be the unknown hero or the potential future victim.
The artist directs dynamic moments of happiness. Personal
family moments giving out a breath of life. Decay and
destruction are still here, but children are painting on walls
and their voices change the world. Arrows and faces are
pointing to possible escape routes.
At the same time there are interspersed references to objects of
our era, to hard faces, to oft-hated and repulsive symbols, all
of which serve as a mosaic of lost hopes, sensations and
atmosphere … The atmosphere, the smell of our age … A routine
take on attitudes and expectations prevails everywhere.
Choosing among parties becomes increasingly like choosing among
different wash powder brands of the same manufacturer.
While one billion people are being converted into consumers.
Today’s man has conquered outer space, has tremendously
progressed in sciences and has invented the miracle of the world
wide web. And yet, he is more ferocious than ever before. The
simplest emotional and psychological problems, what defines
emotional and material dependence on others, are still in a
primitive stage.
Everyone, not just artists and creators, have a duty, as
Joseph-Beuys used to say, to ponder and talk about future
interpretation of civilisation, which needs to be born out of
art, because nothing else can shed light on it.
The artist says: I feel lucky. Think how many billions of
people live below poverty line, how many millions face an
incurable health issue.
In recent years I have travelled to the most far away peoples of
the world and I have visited mysterious temples and
civilizations; Peru, Bolivia, Indonesia, Cambodia, Thailand and
elsewhere. I am interested in ancient art, the human kind stone
and water. I admire the power of the civilization and Art of
different peoples and I have intensely felt their fear of
survival through earthquakes, sea floods and storms. The
distance also serves to unravel consciousness. One enters other
situations. One finds oneself at the edge of the cliff and one
revises everything. I am lucky to be healthy and able to admire
and create. I have no other provision in the face of death but
to create Art before its coming, as René Char said. I paint
because I worry and fear for man and earth and I want others to
worry as well. I paint because I am mainly interested in the
sense of freedom. I paint because life is an adventurous path
in a continuous quest for expression. |
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