Selected work

60 x 45 cm (height variable)

Cotton string, sewing needles, crystal receptacles, water, tracing paper, print and wooden table

A still life in itself, the installation plays on the complex legacy of the painting genre: the returning ambiguities of appearance and reality, the delight of the visible and the vanity of delight, allegory and pure imagery, caducity and permanence.

White (A4) printing paper and metal pins

20 x 150 cm (length variable)

True lines do not exist in nature; we invent them. They are poetic fiction.

-Rico Lebrun

Skeleton of the most primitive landscape: two gradients, one on top of another - a seascape. 

b/w video, 6’

The video turns on a scene from Laurence Olivier’s 1948 film adaptation of Hamlet. The source sequence shows a brief section of Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy:

                                 (…)to die – to sleep,

No more, and by a sleep to say we end

The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to: ‘tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep (…)

This Hamlet gets trapped in a vicious circle: as though the second “to die, to sleep” gets perpetually confused with the first “to die – to sleep”, eternally short-circuiting back to his first idea. Hamlet is either particularly obsessed with the thought, or cannot remember what comes next.

The obstinate repetition of the text and the cycles of regular and inverted shots - slowly oscillating in and out - gradually conjure a pulsing, hypnotic loop. Hamlet’s articulated brooding on death is drained down to an abstraction.

video installation
Steel cable, hooks, fir planks, video projector, power cable, tightening straps, cardboard, cotton strings and tracing paper.
400 cm (H), 220 cm (r)

Exhibition view at the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent (BE). 

Something that can hold in this slippery world is a mechanical structure of precarious balance which tiptoes on a slice of the horizon line. Projected as a simple seascape on suspended tracing paper, the horizon figures as the original and elemental line; the archetype of any graphic gesture; and the embryo of any dichotomy or dialectic.

Thus charged with dialectical (and ontological) responsibilities, the image of the horizon makes of this pendulum a primitive cosmological model, perhaps an inspired Pre-Socratic image of the Universe. The horizon has apparent weight; it hovers detached and no longer contiguous to the ground, shot at the center of the Earth rather than at its tangent. 

HD video

1'

Bits of “breathing” (inhalation)  isolated from concert footage and compiled to compose one minute of respiration. 

The artist wishes to thank Ars Nova Copenhagen.

video
5'
October 2015

The video is a five-minute montage of collected seconds of silence. The source material comes from piano recital footage: each fragment marks the rare occurrence of an absolute gap between the extinguished last note of a performance and the ensuing applause.

Ink and pencil on printing paper
70 x 50 cm
July 2015

The activity of drawing is notably defined as a reduction of reality by one dimension - from three to two.

In this sense, all objects are continuously “drawn” in their footprint – their two-dimensional impression is always real and manifest in their outline against the supporting ground; an object as is felt or seen by the ground.

Drawing is maybe not an invention after all, but a discovery. 

Plaster and projector
300 x 30 x 15 cm (length of plaster segment variable)
June 2015

I slide a profile along a straight marble edge while adding plaster in front of the triangular opening. Repeated additions of plaster approximate more and more the prismatic shape that the profile disciplines, pulled recurrently. On the opposite end of the profile a projector shoots the image of a perfectly equilateral triangle against the triangular section of the plaster body. This projected triangle is perfectly aligned and sharp at one point along the axis – I pull the profile and extend the plaster prism until I reach this matching point.

Two opposed movements that come from the same immaterial reality: geometry and the digital virtual. Each comes with a potential for perfection, and both meet at the failing point where none lives up to its promise.

The plaster prism has been made through vivid efforts at approximation to straightness and a perfect triangle; the projected image is on the other hand disrupted in its perfection simply because of its medium, the fact that it has been externalized.

Two drawings, 18 x 25 each
Pencil and linseed oil on paper
May 2015

 "Unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and unto God the things which are God's" 

                                                                                      -Matthew 22:21

Two sheets of paper placed flat one above the other are impregnated with oil. The oil stains the top paper (dedicated to Caesar) and is then filtered to the bottom sheet (“to God”), creating a corresponding transparency in the two. The millenial tradition of textual exegesis of the Biblical parable is taken up by this setup: it is the particular quality of the paper - its permeability and absorbtion capacity - that decides the rationing between Caesar and God, performing each time a fresh interpretation of Christ’s dictum.

Salt
Dimensions and number variable
December 2014

Tied to the material contingency of the body, salt oozes from our pores and glands through tears, sweat and blood. In spite of this “base origin“ of salt, it has been repeatedly invoked in alchemy and religion as an element with esoteric, supernatural qualities. 

Salt piece is a series of simple, modest objects made of salt - salt cast in door wedges to be used for propping, supporting or holding still. Discreet on the one hand, the pieces seem to jarringly glare out with the primeval, occult intensity that the material has been recurrently attributed with.    

Sea salt

3 editions:

Oval 22 x 15 x 1 cm (2 pieces)

Depressed arch 15 x 11 x 1 cm (8 pieces)

Round arch 12 x 8 x 1 cm (2 pieces)

January - May 2015

Is to salt as salt is to results from my experiments with melting sea salt and the unexpected appearance salt assumes under specific conditions of temperature and method.   

I insistently tried to make a mirror out of salt, seduced by the corrispondence of this ambition to that of the medieval alchemist: seeking a transformation not limited just to a physical change of state, but one which brings forth the animate from the inanimate, the mirror out of amorphous, inert matter.

In the conditions of blind pursuit for glitter, this search parallels the ethos of the alchemist: he seeks attentively to transform dirt into gold, only to find that the true magnum opus is the change occurring in the experimenter himself.

Black ink on Chinese paper, cotton string
5 drawings, 85 x 50 cm each
September 2012(destroyed)

In August 1961, following the DDR political summit’s orders, East Germany’s military forces drew out a line that physically divided Berlin in two. Streets were violently broken; houses were separated from their back yards, paths in parks found a cement wall at their extremity. 
More interestingly, soon a second barrier was built, running some distance inside DDR’s territory meant to further prevent human leaks from the border, thus locking inside that strip of ‘no man’s land’, famously known as Todesstreife. On the outside, streets were turned into dead ends; On the inside, a more dramatic change took place.
Inside, an entirely new idea of topography was brought forth, invoked by the simple gesture of cutting with two parallel lines. The deserted landscape inside the Todesstreife was permeated by a haunting and uncanny emptiness : Streets were isolated, mutilated and left without point of origin or direction, and the tropes that follow from the idea of a 'way' discredited.

I took these configurations (following satellite shots taken in late 1988) as a fragmented idiom, to be repeated until they appear human:  After more than 400 drawings, they became strange hieroglyphic marks that struggle to appear parts of one and the same language. 
 

Hand cut paper, oil pastel, gouache, pencil
11 pieces, approx. 25 x 25 each
Venice, December 2013 – February 2014

Variations on a theme: this series of drawings comes forth from the abstracted sewage and doorphone stones of Venice. Rudimentary filtering devices to separate water, voices and looks - from bodies.