LOST IN TRANSLATION
In my work as an artist, I attempt to examine and explore the concept of duration, which signifies both the integrity and the incompleteness of the artistic process. Simultaneously, I experiment with intuitive and spontaneous mark-making, gestural tendencies, a variety of mediums, surfaces, textures, and the size of the pictures, often times operating outside the frame. I consider image-making a recognized necessity not always connected with the reasons of the practical mind. Using calligraphic motifs, a limited color palette, and freely associated icons, I try to uncover a personal coding system of symbols and characters, mimicking the abstract and complex patterns of sensations, affections, and generally, sensible influences.
Following Robert Storr's axiom, “Think with the senses - feel with the mind. Art in the present tense", my intention is to reflect on duration as the "continuum" of time, the past, present, and future, and to weaken the resistance of the present moment to the past and the future. Additionally, there is the recurring concept of instant gratification, here and now as opposed to then and there. The slightly neurotic treatment of the picture plane is based on the strategic decision to avoid a fundamental contradiction between conception and realization. The method is to eliminate the planned/controlled aspect in artistic production and to explore the intensity of the irrational component and its symbolic representation: impulse, instinct, spontaneity, obsession, and last minute panic attack. The form, or amorphous configurations of artwork is the content; the process is the narrative of the Present and in time, while generating an image from nothing creates an experience for the maker.
Being bilingual, I am interested in the figure of speech rather than language, which often creates unnecessary barriers, boundaries, and limitations. Language, as a form of expression borrowed from an external world, deforms the essence of inner sensations; words are cultural forms taken from outside sources, and their meaning is saturated with a social aspect. Language transforms and transfixes the meaning of the work while labeling it by what sounds appropriate, but is in fact a rigid equivalent of the given vocabulary, frozen in time. My ultimate goal is to develop a visual language based on self-dramatizing ideas of intuition that will stimulate the ongoing subjective perceptual reactions of others.