Note to Claudia,
Since we decided to show both the new paintings from this summer alongside last year's work, I think the best approach is to regard it as a process piece, i.e., all pieces are very personal, derived from diary entries, etc. Now excuse me if I start writing in bullet points or repeat something.
I believe the safest way to fully embrace this voyage through seemingly incoherent images is to think of the first paintings as beggining of cognition or image ignition process
Like when you’re a child, and you push your hands over closed eyelids; the brain starts looking for a light source and sees these purple and green-hued lightning flashes turning into something ornamental and back to lightning in small portions of a second.
Additionally, the purple painting is based on an X-ray of my grandmother's head in late stages of dementia.
I could talk about how that portion of private history affects all of my work, but I’m feeling a bit impatient with myself right now.
Regarding process, focus on how the transition from something that is very much a stain—a sort of amalgamation of intense pain combined with what I now regard as only the ramblings of a madman—through time becomes more refined and, in many regards, reproduces the same story over and over. (Okay, I lost it here, but I’ll leave it since it might inspire something.)
The point being, the paintings have a sort of occult self-healing property; as painting is the manipulation of pigment stains within a puddle on a plane, the same can be said for the human.
Primal (stain) out da womb; screaming; dripping >>>>> nonsensical recollection; coming to; learning the walk (there's very little border between the "I" and the surrounding world) > puppet theatre; man as machine and beyond, THE WORK...
**Reading material:**
- In Search of the Miraculous (there's a Živko Nikolić film on YouTube in English that encapsulates the whole book in 40 minutes)
- A Light on the Path by Mabel Collins (it's about 70 pages and serves as a sort of guidebook)
- Branko Miljković’s Orphic Heritage (I think I have it translated somewhere)
- Anne Sexton’s “You, Doctor Martin” (a good piece to know by heart, just for the heck of it)
**Soundtrack of the season:**
- Chet Baker on Poetry
- Miles Davis' Big Fun
- Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage
And if none of this helps, just focus on the titles of each piece, especially the pieces from "In Garden." You will see that everything almost always comes in duos and is about being with another since besides being obsessed with the inherent flaws of being human rather than a porcelain doll, I am also a hopeless romantic.
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