1/ Threshold, 2024

Charcoal, pigment, pumice, acrylic polymer on canvas

195x130 cm

Courtesy of the artist

2/ Please turn off all electronic devices (2), 2024

Charcoal, acrylic polymer on canvas, stainless steel and aluminum custom frame

62x47 cm

Courtesy of the artist

Two Speed, 2025​

Charcoal, pigment, pumice, acrylic polymer on canvas, 100x70 cm​

© Courtesy of the artist and Altman Siegel, photo by J.A.M.

You use cropping and extreme close-ups throughout your work, detaching images from any identifiable context. Could we see that as a form of generosity toward the viewer, giving them space to project their own reading?

Removing context was something I had from the very beginning of my studies, though it looked very different then: structures placed in large blank spaces, all emptiness. The opposite of what I do now. I zoomed in more and more because I became interested in representing materials themselves, and that's how I arrived at these closer views.

I wouldn't call it generous exactly, it's more a consequence of what I'm trying to make. But there is an intention, because the really cropped views detach identities and spatial references. It creates something timeless and that's the point. It's simultaneously intimate and anonymous, because there's no clue about who it is, what it is, where it is. It does give the viewer a certain freedom, but more as a byproduct.

What I'm really after is this quality of a fleeting, ephemeral memory, that feeling of focus on a single detail, the way the mind fixes on something for just a moment before it dissolves.

Could it also be a way of protecting something, keeping a certain distance from what is, after all, very personal material? Oh, it is. It's most visible in the recent works, where I've moved from landscapes and machines toward people. You never see a full face, never a full body. Identifying anyone would be practically impossible. And yet these are only the closest people to me, so it's deeply intimate. It operates like a kind of double protection: what remains mine stays mine, and what reaches the viewer stays completely anonymous.

It makes me think of Gerhard Richter's portrait of his wife, painted from the back. There's this endless tenderness and coldness at the same time.

This painting was actually one of my very first references when I started looking at art. Richter fascinated me precisely because of those distant portraits, I find you can feel more of a person depicted from behind than from the front. It's more intimate because it's less protected: when you meet someone's gaze, there's a point of control, an appearance being managed.

From the back, that disappears entirely. And that's exactly the gaze I'm trying to hold when I depict people. No one is watching the viewer, you're the only one watching. That moment, especially with someone close to you, becomes more of a mental space than an exchange.

Your earlier series titles reach into mythology, Leviathan, Hadal. What does mythology offer that a more direct or descriptive title wouldn't?

Those titles were for series that were less personal than my recent work, they didn't reveal much on their own, which was the point. I always make the works first and think about the title afterwards, and mythology felt right because it belongs to everyone. It's a common foundation. I wanted to connect these very present, very industrial machines to something that doesn't belong to our time at all.

Leviathan exists across many different religions and myths, often depicted as destructive, but in some stories it's more ambiguous, a monster capable of destroying the universe in order to rebuild it. That duality is exactly how I wanted to approach those machines. I also liked giving them a living title, something organic, because those machines have tails and long necks, they reminded me of a giant snake, as if they were the bodies of ancient creatures.

Hadal works differently, It's actually, above everything, a scientific and geographic term, the deepest zone of the ocean, largely unknown to humans. I found something compelling in naming a series of seascapes, images that only ever show the surface, after the deepest, most hidden part. I don't see that series as pure landscapes at all. It's more of a mental space, a category of feeling. More recently, I tend to have literature references for the titles. They are more directed toward this idea of mental space, of inner discussion. J.G. Ballard, whose work I greatly admire, has been a major inspiration.