The work begins with a problem of perception.

We learn to see by naming. The mind encounters a form, assigns it a word, and advances. A nose. A hand. A building. Once named, the object ceases to be perceived. It is merely recognized. Perception contracts into classification, and the visible world is reduced from a field of intensities to a catalogue of the already-known.

My painting practice operates against this contraction. To stand before the canvas and withhold the name. To meet color and form as phenomena prior to representation, before the mind converts sensation into category. This has been the single question throughout the practice. The means of posing it have continually changed.

The early work was volatile. Dense oil and acrylic, laid fast, destroyed, reconstituted. Heads and bodies constructed through gesture at a proximity that denies the image legibility. What I sought was the threshold where a configuration of pigment begins to emit expression autonomously, prior to recognition. Not a portrait. A becoming-face. An intensity not yet arrested by language.

The inquiry then shifted register. A body of work on forced displacement reintroduced the figure at the scale of the collective. Bodies in transit. Masses crossing terrain. The perceptual method remained, but the magnitude changed. What does it mean to perceive a crowd before the mind files it under a term? Before the bodies congeal into “refugees” or “crisis”? The paintings demanded that affect precede category.

Later, the site of investigation moved from the head to the hand. The face radiates involuntary expression. The hand enacts deliberate gesture. The clenched fist, the open palm, the fingers in extension. I wanted to locate the precise moment where form tips into emotional charge, severed from narrative, unanchored from context. The hand as a conductor of expressional force, nothing more.

Each phase has subtracted something. Color, then form, then the body itself. What remains is the interval: the space between sensation and recognition, the duration in which the world presents itself as pure intensity before language forecloses it.

The work materializes in that suspended moment. It is made there and it exists there. Between the act of creation and the act of perception, there is a point where the painting has not yet become an image, where pigment has not yet resolved into representation. The practice is to hold that point open. To keep the surface in a state of becoming. What the viewer encounters is not a finished object but an arrested threshold, a duration made visible, still vibrating between what is seen and what is known.