"I live repeating processes all the time - I grew up in a self-destructing, volcanic landscape that constantly moves".
The world is a field for perception, and human consciousness assigns meaning to the world. We cannot separate ourselves from our perceptions of the world through the way of each of us interpret any experience based on our sensations and imagination. My most recent paintings therefore focus on how other people would perceive a landscape when it has been painted with minimal chromatic range, by just adding different densities of paint repetitively with rhythmical movements. What would they read and subsequently feel?
Each painting is a meditative journey for me. It comes from an exhaustive research of materials, such as ivory black pigment. I have an enquiring mind so I constantly challenge my ideas and thoughts that trigger my interest in how a form or a subject matter is perceived and how far can this can be explored. For example, we imagine a landscape from distant worlds in literature, cinema or even from the space program. My interest is to understand and describe, as accurately as I can, forms following the earth's principles of the formation of geological layers, the way they move in nature, in time, and how nature documents its own history.
This painting process has been influenced technically and philosophically by the
American painter Ad Reinhardt on his use of the colour black on his 1960 paintings. I began this project in 2014 to enhance my curiosity about his method of using oil paint, the physicality of the colour black in painting. The result of this
process is even more conceptual and the series of paintings is called “Ganymede", (Jupiter's largest moon).
With special thanks to Hillary Torrence, Associate Paintings Conservator @ Solomon
R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, who kindly provided me with valuable
information.
Imageless: The Scientific Study and Experimental Treatment of an Ad Reinhardt Black Painting. (September 14, 2008. Published on occasion of the
exhibition.)