Artist statement | Creating out of not knowing
Art making happens not only with my hands and eyes, but also with my ears, skin, gut, breath.
My paintings are psycho-geographic explorations that map the places I inhabit, both physically and emotionally. Working through a slow, performative process, I occupy the roles of observer and participant simultaneously. Layer by layer, color, sound, and gesture accumulate as each work evolves, responding directly to its surroundings to form a dense record of a place, an experience, and a moment in time.
This practice is grounded in immersion, using the senses as artistic tools and allowing the boundary between self and environment to become porous. Each work develops in real-time dialogue with its context, absorbing the specificity of place, season, and moment. Thus every painting becomes an aggregates of lived experience, capturing the essence of a site while also revealing my position within it, there and then.
My fascination with change, with the immediate, is visceral and deeply personal. Teetering between life and death at the age of four during heart surgery introduced me early to liminal zones and thresholds. It compelled me to explore the dichotomies inherent in existence, and fuels the totality with which I create to this day. It also informed two major decisions: working across diverse fields (the “white cubes,” the “streets,” and nature), and merging my artistic and meditative practices into a nomadic way of life.
Movement across continents, mediums, and contexts embraces transience, while my practice remains a grounding force. Together, they provide a flexible foundation from which to investigate the meeting points between internal and external landscapes, revealing frictions and pathways toward connection, balance, agency, and release. Every new place drives the work and vice versa. Each project becomes a temporary refuge and a stage where the fleeting takes shape. While this process results in tangible artworks, its essence remains performative: art and life exist in the act of perceiving and creating, and in their inherent impermanence.
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Technique & Breakdown of series over the years
My technique is mixed-media. I integrate fine-art and industrial materials and tools:
From tools typically used for building walls or floor tiles, to soft watercolor brushes, pallet knives, print rollers and metal scrapers.
Acrylic paints, inks and markers are mixed with various mediums such as glazing liquid, conditioner and silicone oil,
substances that impact the behavior of the pigments in unexpected ways. In the streets, I use hand cut letters and elements made with yarn, fabric, treated foam and duct-tape.
Early works:
In my time as a student, the early works ("Red Heart", 2007/8 and 2009) were naïve, minimalistic drawings.
Bodies and situations, subtle yet disturbing. Figures floating in white spaces.
After graduating and over time, extra layers appeared ("Illusions & Reality", 2010-2012 and 2013),
representing the struggle to grow and resolve past, present and future.
In these formative years, I practiced a slow Sisyphean process in which every piece took months. Then a change took place,
and my practice shifted into a quick, dance-like ritual. ("Release", 2014-2016). These paintings were done in one continuous session, each session lasting between a day to three days of constant work, stopping only for food and short stints of sleep.
The Serendipity Experiment 2017-2021
Between 2017 to 2021 I was immersed in an experimental performance, together with my partner in Mind The Heart! Project.
Our premise was to accept the unknown as an artistic tool, by committing fully to relinquishing control.
We followed the first rule of Improv theater - SAY YES. For this purpose, we donated all our belongings, moved to live in a van
in a foreign country, and invited strangers to dictate our route, schedule, and next encounters. At each point we were sent to, we created public works, daily. What was planned for one year ended up lasting four, spanning more than 60,000 miles (100,000 km) in 48 states across the U.S.A. as well as other countries.
The Unimaginable Horizon 2021- ongoing
Living on the road for four years (of which two in the pandemic), while committing to the totality which the performance necessitated, heralded another big shift in my process. Returning to a normative studio setting in late 2021 uncovered the tantalizing realization that previous inspirations and techniques now felt irrelevant. I couldn’t just pick up from where I left off.
The journey had fundamentally changed the way I perceived stability, home, possessions, necessity.
It altered the way I lived and subsequently, the way I created.
It felt crucial to allow the full breadth of my experiences to manifest directly onto the canvas, and these experiences were
too expansive to fit into figurative works, such as the ones I created before. My previous areas of research,
such as archetypes and mythologies, felt more like crutches than points of reference.
Free from the need to adhere to one "coherent" idea or to convey a comprehensible image,
an uninhibited expression was unleashed and with it, a flood of intuitive works.
Since 2021 I’ve painted over fifty abstract paintings. They represent a form of cartography –
to places familiar and unknown, to blocked paths and to new roads.
