"Formula of Ritual" Painting

My paintings explore the unstable space between the human figure, the animal, and the landscape. I am interested in images that seem recognizable at first—a face, a cat, a bird, a flower, a body—but gradually become something less certain. Figures emerge from layers of paint, disappear into them, and sometimes seem to transform into plants, animals, architecture, or fragments of landscape.

I work through accumulation rather than illustration. Paint is built up, scraped away, overwritten, drawn into, and allowed to remain visibly unresolved. Acrylic, ink, drawing, dry textures, stains, and gestural marks coexist without being completely subordinated to one another. The drawing often cuts through the painted surface, preserving the sensation of something being discovered rather than deliberately constructed.

The works are populated by recurring figures: animals with human qualities, human figures with animal or botanical attributes, masked faces, profiles, birds, flowers, and hybrid forms. These are not intended as fixed symbols. They function more like characters in an unfinished language. A cat may become a witness; a flower may become a head; a bird may suggest movement, thought, or escape. Their meanings remain fluid.

Color plays an important structural role. I use intense blues, greens, pinks, violets, oranges, reds, yellows, and chalky whites not simply to describe the visible world but to create a psychological landscape. Color can separate forms, contradict them, conceal them, or bring unrelated elements into the same space.

There is also a recurring sense of looking through something—a window, a frame, a grid, foliage, a veil, or a dense accumulation of marks. The paintings often seem to occupy a threshold between inside and outside, intimacy and observation, freedom and containment. The grid in some works is architectural; in others it feels psychological. It can be a window, a cage, a structure of thought, or simply another layer of the painting.

I am less interested in telling a single story than in creating a situation in which several stories can coexist. The paintings resist a clean distinction between portrait and landscape, human and animal, figure and abstraction. They operate somewhere between memory and invention, recognition and uncertainty.

For me, painting is therefore not primarily a process of representing an image. It is a process of finding an image inside the act of painting itself.