About
Artist
Statement
I think of the human body as a sensitive, ever-shifting space, in constant dialogue with its surroundings, responding to them while carrying its own stories, desires, and fragility. In my Fragmented Venus series, I explore what trembles at the threshold between the sublime and the grotesque, where echoes of nostalgia, solitude, and alienation are at once familiar and distant, and where the body opens emotional and philosophical spaces beyond the visible.
Ovid’s Metamorphoses, especially Stephanie McCarter’s female-centered translation, profoundly informs my work. These retold myths become more than a collection of stories; they reflect the fragility of existence and the intertwined forces of desire, power, and resistance. The great love stories, once idealized, are often filled with fear, coercion, and silenced voices; the male pursuer drives the woman toward transformation despite her refusal. These narratives reveal the subtle layers of passion, violence, and vulnerability, and it is this insight that inspires my distorted female figures, glimpsed in the midst of metamorphosis.
Informed by these mythic narratives of love, rupture, and metamorphosis, my work reflects on the paradox of unity through fragmentation. Echoes of ancient tales—where desire and loss intertwine—emerge not as direct representations but as atmospheric undercurrents, lending an eerie, melancholic charge to each composition.
The grotesque is not the opposite of the sublime, but another face of it—the fracture where perfection shatters, exposing the raw reality of existence. Beauty, for me, resides not in perfection, but in fragility and vulnerability. It is here, in the encounter of classical ideals and distortion, of flaws and fragmentation, that the emotional and conceptual space of my paintings is created. Through the interplay of distortion and allure, I seek to unsettle the viewer’s perception, inviting contemplation of the liminal space between presence and absence, appearance and dissolution. The grotesque is not a deviation from beauty, but its necessary counterpart—an axis along which meaning is destabilized and reimagined. Each painting is a philosophical proposition: a question of what endures when the surface fractures, and what truths are revealed when the ideal is no longer intact.
As McCarter’s translation shows, neither stories nor identity can be considered neutral; multiple perspectives determine what becomes visible and what remains silenced. In my paintings, the fragmentation of the body simultaneously conveys the instability of ideals, the tension between the visible and the hidden, and the interplay of fragility and strength. The figures are at once intimate and universal, personal and monumental, creating a contemplative space where the dialectics of beauty and the grotesque, vulnerability and power, visibility and concealment can unfold.