The background of my way of working
The point of departure for my artistic working process could be seen as an investigation of the material properties of the painting in relation to its pictorial elements, its expression, and finally its visual motif. Nevertheless, my thinking is not formalist, rather, my interest is focused on the formation of meaning in the painting. My working process starts from an empty ground surface/space, in which I bring together in the pictorial narrative elements that often seem to be mutually incompatible, one of which then emerges as the pictorial level that defines the work.
My paintings combine the tension and the interrelationship between the mark and the sign. The mark is organized into a sign and then dismantled again into its parts, or then the mark becomes a part of the visual motif and the pictorial narrative and then, only a moment later, is disrupting and dismantling its own recognizability. The mark combines the material properties of the work with the raw components that are still finding their own shape.
What happens in the work is often an action linked with perception, the moment when something becomes recognizable. Working between two poles produces two kinds of paintings: those that are highly organized and recognizable in their visual motifs, such as Canisters, and those that are not so clearly recognizable and in which the motif is still taking shape.
Artwork
Sometimes, when the meaning of the painting primarily derives from the material being used: form the marks left by the canvas, pigment, spatula, roller or brush, and from the structures that they form…
And then again, when the subject chosen for depiction consists of objects from the perceived phenomenal world, or their absence, the meaning attaches itself to the object or is left hovering around the edges of the missing object.
My paintings can equally well come out of nothingness and be constructed only on canvas. I can try to depict emptiness, attempt to forcibly take a piece of the invisible along with me, or the starting point for the painting can be a kind of pre-set arrangement, a clear-cut or amorphous image, and the work advances by keeping to it. The painting is often an image of a motif of which I have only a shaky mental image where I begin, but that image becomes sharper as the work progresses.
From then on, I already have an image or an idea in my head that demands to be painted, and all my previous ways of approaching the motif are momentarily forgotten.