After my studies I needed to get away from everything I had learned. I was suffocated by academicism, by hatching, by realist still lifes.
Between 2018 and 2020 I rejected almost all of it. I worked abstractly, in large formats, in a private body of research on the materiality of painting. That period gave me a more complete picture of painting. I was able to come back to faces, to gazes, to emotional states, differently than through the lens of study.
The trigger was a short journey to the Middle East. Out of it came The Glass Revolution: 13 paintings, 13 people who left a mark on me.
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Alongside it I was painting characters. I am fascinated by how what a person goes through leaves visible traces on their face. I try to render those signs. I am also interested in what happens afterwards. Someone looks at the face without knowing the person behind it and reacts to it. This is where the name of the Tronie series came from. Tronie is a seventeenth-century Dutch term....
I work on a painting for a long time. I return to it many times. The first resolved state is not necessarily the final one: I can wipe out an area that was already working if, after a few days, it starts to look too safe. Other areas stay almost untouched. I have no rule that decides in advance how long a painting takes or how many transformations it will go through.
I paint at night. It is not the ideal condition for oil painting. Daylight shows hues and saturation more faithfully. I have taught myself to manage the dissonances and chromatic aberrations. At night I disconnect from the city, from everything going on around me, from everything.
I do not want my painting to stay unchanged in order to protect an identity. If a painting is no longer allowed to evolve, it dies at the moment of that decision.