My paintings are visual expressions of personal or collective experiences.
Most of my work is abstract. I usually work fast, trying to keep the process largely intuitive. Ambiguities and “unfinished”, undefined elements are there to be relished and to invite the viewer to engage in an equally intuitive process of seeing.
In the double-series “About Time” (2010) , however, I juxtaposed minimalist ("planetary") paintings, representing a natural, cyclical experience of Time (“Time I”), to abstract expressionist pieces, which represented the more fractured way of experiencing Time (“Time II”), which modern technology makes us engage in.
"Matter of Color” (2011) was an attempt to address the tension between
Nature and Technology, through the interaction
between color and line within each painting.
In 2012 I returned to the subject of Time. The three pieces entitled "Chronos" (or "Intersections") deal with an experience of time as it passes, with an awareness of the past, the present and the future--as opposed to a focus on the present moment.
The present moment is celebrated in "Kairos", 2012. Using any painterly method that felt right, I positioned disparate shapes, masses, lines on the canvas, while keeping a close eye on what happened “in-between”. All the elements included in the painting became players which needed to be dealt with. As I did, my goal was to create a field of energy while maintaining a sense of openness. It felt like a reflection of life.
In the following summer, that sense of openness was threatened. I found a piece of a torn fishing net at the beach and decided to use it. It became my tool and my subject both in the series "The Scandal and the Beauty of It" (2013) and in "Net Works" (2014)
2014: "Net Works"
Nets are useful objects, freighted with symbolic meaning.
When I first found a piece of fish netting last year it suggested entrapment—the essence of the human condition, it seemed to me. That net, and many others, became printing tools.
The ink (or paint)-drenched imprint of netting suggests a powerful reality. Using the structure it provides I may react against it, erase it, paint over it, create negative or positive spaces, layers--or I may treat it as an entity in its own right.
As I explored techniques and their effects, the appearance and the meaning of the net kept changing. The net as instrument of entrapment, which I had initially been railing against, then relegated to a number of different roles, gradually moved to center stage and acquired a life of its own: It simply was. There were even moments when I felt that I “was” the net, or that the net had “become” the “fish”. Or that the net was simply a pervasive presence, connecting everything.
Throughout all these transformations, the netting still represents the human condition, I believe. What has changed is the artist’s perspective.
2015/16: "The Net Reconfigured" and "Breaking Through" (installation):
This series is still about nets and about the way they capture or rein in. What's new here is the attempt to cut through them, and to create a new world from the broken pieces. In more general terms it is about confinement and liberation, but also about destruction and reintegration.