Artist statement:
Late-night visions provide the source for most of my work. The oscillation between the conscious and unconscious; the quest for novel and alternative worlds and the unravelling of the connections between them; the marriage of the imaginative and the autobiographical - it all nourishes my sculptures, installations, paintings, and lately, also my video pieces, and create a meditative and aesthetic experience.
The paintings range from the figurative to the abstract. The abstract works are embedded with fields of monochromatic colors that range from greys to deep blues, from crystal greens to intense ocher. These almost-corporal expressionist as well as transparent and lucid paintings aim at capturing painting’s overwhelming power as an act in the world. The recognizable forms and images that emerge or flicker through the layers of colors suggest the artistic struggle between representation and abstraction, between restraint and freedom, between the legible and the illegible.
The figurative paintings are flooded with ladders, tubes, strange monstrous creatures, symbolic landscapes that seek to bridge the world below with the world above, while facing fragile human existence. Alas, the ladders tend to break, crumble and drown in the sea, the tubes remain sealed and clogged, the creatures are entangled within themselves, the icy landscapes are slippery.
The sculptures and installations are a follow up and an embodiment of the paintings. They are made of scraps of white Styrofoam packaging that have been tossed in the garbage after completing their original mission. I collect them and give them new life, recycling them into large scale installations and into separate smaller sculptures.
Styrofoam is the emblematic artificial man-made non-biodegradable material. It is anti-sculptural in essence because of its non-elasticity, its tendency to break down into endless parts, and its textural surface. The usage of white Styrofoam creates in my sculptures a stillness and a sense of the sublime as well as movement and possible disintegration at any given moment. They resonate geometrical-architectural forms as well as the human body, while dealing with the whole and the fragments coinciding.
The sculptures are Neo Futuristic intertwining archaic primordial motifs. Thus, through matter and form, the sculptures bring up questions regarding human condition vis-à-vis nature and in nature. These issues evolve into great orchestrations in the three installations - Fire, After All, Tears - and the videos that follow. These works have evolved out of the sculptures to create grand environments that force the spectator to face the catastrophic affect that man has on nature. They also are a place of fantasy, both threatening and appealing.