Statement

My artistic practice explores memory, the figure, and gesture through a specific pictorial technique: frottage. This process, both instinctive and rigorous, involves “rubbing” the canvas first primed in white from a surface with irregular protrusions using brushes that lay down oil paint while also erasing, scraping, layering, and allowing forms to emerge. This gesture, which may seem brutal, ultimately reveals a paradoxical softness in its final nuances. The surface of the canvas becomes a ground where roughness and fragility meet head-on.

Through this technique, I seek a deliberate form of poverty, a pared-back approach that refuses superficial layers of paint or any kind of sumptuousness. Frottage flattens the material, cancels out volume, until forms begin to float, wavering between appearance and disappearance. The faults and hollows that surface are not accidents, but places I intentionally look for and cultivate.

The figures I paint, often distorted or dislocated, reflect my experience of presence as something always beyond the Other’s reach. These breaks in continuity, unsettle the viewer, creating a sense of disorientation not only in the face of the other’s strangeness, but also in the way that strangeness can feel uncomfortably close.

In my paintings, frottage becomes a language inscribed into matter, where the pursuit of smoothness is simply not within my field of vision. Painting is not a finished object, but a space of tension, where texture, the hollow, and the fissure give rise to hospitable forms through their support or their content: forms I would like to feel as an invitation.