Works
phase_002026
The face in phase_0 appears less as a fixed portrait than as a form in the process of becoming visible. Features emerge from a dense field of pale pink, cream and muted violet, while other areas seem to dissolve back into the painted surface. Recognition remains incomplete. The darkened eye area anchors the image, but the boundaries between face, ground and gesture are unstable. Paint accumulates, is dragged across the surface and partially obscures what it has just revealed. Within the context of EARLY STATES, the work can be read as a provisional image of the self: not yet resolved into a stable figure, but suspended between appearance and disappearance.
phase_022026
In phase_02, the face is clearly present, yet access to it is interrupted. Binary digits spread across the dark blue ground while dense bands of red and pale paint pass over the eyes, turning the act of seeing into the central point of obstruction. The numerical field suggests a system of information without offering an obvious message to decode. Against it, the painted figure remains physical, irregular and materially exposed. The smooth logic associated with digital information is confronted by accumulation, friction and paint that refuses clean boundaries.
phase_032026
In phase_03, the face occupies almost the entire pictorial field. Its features remain recognizable, yet the eyes are crossed by a dense horizontal layer of pale paint that interrupts the possibility of direct encounter. The obstruction is not separate from the portrait but materially embedded within it. Scraped and layered surfaces remain visible beneath the skin tones, while the surrounding blue and green fields merge with the contours of the face. What appears solid at first begins to lose its boundaries on closer inspection. Within EARLY STATES, phase_03 shifts the tension from emergence toward concealment. The figure is present, but access to it is withheld. Seeing and being seen become unstable conditions rather than reciprocal acts.
phase_042026
In phase_04, the face is brought into close view, yet it remains only partially available. The eyes appear softly and without strong contour, while a broad horizontal band of muted rose passes across the mouth, interrupting the site of speech. The painting is quieter in tone than other works in the series. Browns, ochres and dark reds create a dense, subdued atmosphere in which the figure seems to emerge through wiping, tracing and repeated revision rather than direct assertion. Lines remain visible beneath the surface, as if the image were still being searched for while it is already present. Within EARLY STATES, phase_04 shifts attention from visibility to articulation. The figure is not erased, but held in a condition prior to full expression. What appears here is a face at the threshold of language: present, fragile and not yet fully able to speak.
residue_002025
In residue_00, the face does not emerge as a stable portrait but as a remaining trace. Broad layers of orange, violet and brown are crossed by a pale blue horizontal band that both marks and interrupts the image. The figure appears to hover between visibility and erasure: eyes, nose and mouth are legible, yet they are held inside a surface of drips, veils and repeated overpainting.
The work suggests an image remembered rather than fully present. Its structure recalls an afterimage — something briefly seen that persists only as a residue on the retina or in memory. The painted face is therefore less an identity than a deposit: a provisional form left behind by gesture, revision and disappearance. Within this tension, residue_00 becomes an image of persistence under pressure, where the self remains visible only through its partial loss.
residue_012026
In residue_01, the figure is reduced to a sparse but insistent structure. Thick layers of pale paint are spread across the canvas, partially concealing fragments of colour and pattern beneath. Black linear strokes hold the image together, sketching a head in profile while leaving large areas unresolved. The face appears less as a complete depiction than as a construction emerging through obstruction.
The work stages a tension between concealment and definition. Broad passages of off-white paint act like a veil, covering and compressing the surface, while the darker lines reassert the presence of a figure. What remains visible is only a partial image: a head, a neck, a direction of gaze, but no stable identity. The painting thus operates as a residue of looking — a form that persists through covering, scraping and revision.
Within the residue group, residue_01 can be understood as an image of persistence under erasure. It does not present the self as fixed or fully available, but as something held temporarily in place by a few necessary marks.
residue_022026
In residue_02, the figure is pushed close to dissolution. A face seems to surface from a dense, agitated field of dark pigments, broken by abrupt passages of blue, white and deep red. Thick deposits of paint, scraping marks and scattered gestures disrupt the coherence of the portrait, so that recognition occurs only in fragments: an eye socket, the bridge of a nose, the trace of a mouth. The image does not stabilize into a clear likeness, but remains caught in a state of visual pressure.
The painting is structured through collision rather than outline. Material accumulations and sharp contrasts produce a surface that feels excavated rather than composed, as though the face were emerging from beneath layers of revision. White strokes cut across the darker ground like interruptions or signals, while the red area around the mouth anchors the image in a zone of bodily intensity. The figure appears less depicted than exposed through abrasion.
Within the residue group, residue_02 can be read as an image of persistence at the threshold of disappearance. What remains is not a resolved portrait, but a residue of presence — something partially retained after obscuring, scraping and reworking have already taken place.
residue_032026
In residue_03, the face returns with greater clarity, but not with greater certainty. Set against a nearly black field, the figure appears isolated from its surroundings, its features reduced to a limited vocabulary of pale skin tones, black contours and restrained red marks.
The frontal gaze gives the image an immediate presence, yet the face remains difficult to read as an individual portrait. Repeated lines, flattened areas of paint and the surrounding darkness turn the figure into something closer to a mask or retained image than a stable identity. Expression is present, but held at a distance.
Within the residue group, residue_03 marks a shift from dissolution toward persistence. What remains is no longer only a fragment or trace, but a condensed figure that has survived reduction. The image holds together, yet still carries the marks of interruption, revision and loss that define the series.
trace_002025
In trace_00, the face is present only through a shifting network of marks. Broad diagonal strokes move across the surface, repeatedly crossing the eyes, forehead and cheeks until the portrait becomes difficult to separate from the gestures that surround it. Only a few features — the mouth, the outline of the jaw, fragments of the eyes — remain sufficiently stable to hold the figure together.
The image seems less erased than continuously rewritten. Grey, blue, black and flashes of pink pass through the face without respecting its boundaries, turning representation into movement. The figure persists, but only as something traced through successive acts of painting rather than fixed in a single image.
As the first work in the trace group, trace_00 establishes the figure as an after-effect of looking: not a complete portrait, but a set of marks through which presence can still be reconstructed. What remains visible is neither disappearance nor resolution, but the fragile evidence that a figure has passed through the surface.
trace_012026
In trace_01, the figure is held together by only a few persistent marks. A face in profile emerges from a heavily worked field of pale paint, its contours drawn through black lines, scraped passages and isolated flashes of red. Large areas of the image remain unresolved, allowing figure and ground to continuously pass into one another.
Rather than describing the face in full, the painting relies on traces: the curve of the forehead, the line of the nose, a darkened eye and the sharply defined mouth. Thick accumulations of paint conceal as much as they reveal, while fragments of colour beneath the surface suggest earlier states that have not disappeared entirely.
Within the trace group, trace_01 reduces representation to the minimum required for recognition. The figure persists not through completeness, but through a small number of marks that survive repeated covering and revision. What remains is less a portrait than evidence of a presence — a form reconstructed from its traces.
fold_002025
In fold_00, the body contracts into a compact, almost closed form. Limbs overlap and turn inward, while the head disappears between them. The figure remains recognizably human, yet individual features are withheld; posture takes the place of expression.
Against the saturated blue ground, the pale body becomes a structure of bends, joints and enclosed spaces. Black contours hold the form together, while visible brushwork prevents it from becoming anatomically fixed. The body appears both exposed and self-contained.
fold_00 treats withdrawal as a physical configuration rather than a narrative event. The figure does not illustrate a specific emotion; instead, it occupies a state in which the body itself becomes boundary, shelter and enclosure.
fold_012025
In fold_01, a seated figure turns inward, the arms drawn across the body in a gesture that is simultaneously supportive and restrictive. The lowered head and closed eyes remove the figure from direct encounter, shifting attention from facial expression toward posture and touch.
The body is constructed through loose dark contours and repeated passages of brown, violet, red and blue. Rather than separating the figure cleanly from its surroundings, the marks continue across body and ground, allowing the image to remain provisional and unsettled.
Within the fold group, fold_01 approaches self-contact as a form of containment. The gesture can be read as holding, protecting or withdrawing, but the painting does not resolve these possibilities. What remains is the body folded back toward itself, suspended between vulnerability and self-preservation.
convergence_002025
In convergence_00, the image no longer holds to a single figure. Multiple faces emerge simultaneously around a dark central profile, producing a field in which no single identity becomes dominant. Eyes, mouths and partial physiognomies remain individually recognizable, yet they are absorbed into a dense surface of overlapping colour, gesture and material.
The composition is structured through convergence rather than unity. Fragments accumulate around the central form while a horizontal red passage cuts across it, interrupting the distinction between figure and surrounding field. The painting does not resolve its individual presences into a coherent whole; instead, they remain simultaneous, adjacent and partially entangled.
Unlike the more singular figures of the phase, residue or trace works, convergence_00 expands the image into a condition of multiplicity. Identity is no longer approached as one form becoming unstable, but as something produced through the coexistence of several presences.
The work holds these fragments together without reconciling them. What emerges is neither a collective portrait nor a single divided figure, but a dense pictorial field in which looking, being looked at and appearing become simultaneous events.
trace_022025
In trace_02, the figure is reduced almost entirely to line. A head emerges from a pale, heavily worked acrylic surface through thin violet and red marks that define the eyes, nose, mouth, hair and neck without enclosing them into a fully resolved portrait.
The image is produced through incision as much as through painting. Lines cut into and across the acrylic ground, exposing the figure through the physical disturbance of the surface. The surrounding field remains active: scraped textures, faint shifts of colour and irregular traces continue beneath and around the portrait, so that the figure seems less placed onto the surface than discovered within it.
Within the trace group, trace_02 approaches presence through near-minimum means. Recognition depends on a small number of persistent marks rather than on mass or modelling. What remains is a fragile structure of recognition — enough to suggest a person, but never enough to stabilize the image completely.