Before anything else painting is a life long passion for me. I had a painting brush in my hand before I could even read or write. Painting is the most natural way for me to express myself; it is something very much innate in me. I don’t need to be in a special mood or state of mind to be inspired, in order to create. I have lacked a lot of things but have never had to look for inspiration. I don’t even know really what it means to be inspired; whenever I feel like it, and that is quite often, I just get up and got to the studio to work. The feeling of sterility is something unknown to me. Creating art works is the closest thing I have to be in my natural state. Painting transposes me immediately to a world of great intimacy, familiarity; it is like returning to my natural state, kind of returning home.

My paintings are an incessant exploration of my subconscious and all things mysterious and unknown to me within and without. Painting allows me to fathom the depths of my psyche, it is also a place of healing for me, but it is also here that I come close to a meditative state; by this I mean a state of total absorption, where I am totally integrated with the process that is unfolding in front of me. Creating in this sense means revealing and encountering the essence of my own being, my being and in a larger sense, all beings.

I never know beforehand what I am going to paint. It’s in a spontaneous movement that I project myself on the canvas without any prior visualization. It’s the force of the blank surface that captivates and draws me. As the work progresses forms and colors begin to take shape as if slowly emerging from a primordial chaos. Slowly compositions and forms begin to unfold; it’s the force of the unknown, the energy flow of the subconscious that manifesting itself through the creative act guides me through the work. It’s as if, mesmerized by the invisible, its echoes guide my steps. Here we are talking of something very different to an installation; it’s rather a un-installation. I don’t oppose the visceral element to the cerebral one, it’s just that in my work it’s the irruption of the former that gives the impetus to the elaboration of the later; there is sure a thinking process involved in the act of creating but it not one born out of conceptual reasoning and ideations.

It’s always difficult for me to express my paintings through words; for me creating comes closer to something that I would describe as a shamanistic voyage. Words fail to capture the essence of the world of spirits. The same as with my painting; its language belongs to another world, rather, to the other world; the world of the unknown and the unseen.

In a deeper sense, I paint to free my soul.