That’s a difficult one to start with! Maybe a dedicated, unsure and tentative, yet dead sure, goofy and explosive social lone wolf? Strongly linked to its own place on earth: the studio and the closest woods surrounding it.

It was necessary because that’s where I was forced to redefine my goals and myself. It was a period of five years (which is quite a long time) in which I started out with a strong self-confidence. I got completely lost and devastated on the way and, after that, in total quiet and peace I had the time to slowly start building up the fundaments for my artistic vision and language.

I’m trying to feel it before I see it. Sometimes it’s a garment; perhaps an abandoned burled pink top, that makes me feel something that I forgot. Sometimes it’s the howling sound on a particular location. It pressures me to listen, which I then feel like I have to cite and create.

They are some kind of unpaid spiritual workers! They’re pointers, which forces our subconscious to engage, read and feel the poems in which they perform.

It’s a way of creating an emotion, dare to be filled with it and live through it. I can only make art by using myself as a tool to come closer to and understand the things I investigate in. I then actually force myself directly into the eye of the storm —and feel how it feels to be standing there in the cold stream of red water, for example— before I paint it. The natural way for me is to perform my paintings; even in the one where you cannot see my presence in the final result.

The viewer is a necessary part of the works since the paintings are incantations and written with the purpose for being read. But the viewer’s gaze is maybe less prominent in this body of work. The latest paintings deal with more existential inner landscapes, which might be so haunting that we’re not always willing to expose them to other humans. Yet we share them.

A person who might not look at them intellectually but rather is feeling them in the same way you feel heat, light or pressure.

That’s an amazing translation you’re making. One factor, which stoked me on the path, was a sentence in Svetlana Alexievich’s book The Last Witnesses: A Hundred of Unchildlike Lullabys (2004). When I heard it (I sometimes listen to audio books in the studio), I scribbled it down on a post-it, and it got to remain on the studio table during I painted the series. It said: “A white shirt shines far in darkness.”

Yes I have always been interested in it but I have rarely succeeded, haha! No, but it's exactly that which I think is so difficult with the spoken or written word. That too seem credible, get your message across, and even such a basic thing as getting other people to understand what you mean: you have to file down four of the five points on the star, and only let one remain, for it to work as an arrow and to hit its target. I think that is inhibitory. The reality is not so simple, it consists of the five tips pointing in different directions, but it's still a unity with unwavering focus. Not something wishy-washy, fuzzy or sprawling

My entrance to that painting is a three-road highway. One file is this place in the woods where a river stream flows unexploited under the pine trees, between the sandbanks. It dips steeply on both side, but in one place it has created a natural sand beach. The water is clean, it comes from higher up the mountains, but it is reddish brown because of minerals in the soil. This place is for real, and always washes away my sense of powerlessness.
Another highway file are those garments, which may not seem important or special at first sight. But they’re souls, or part of souls, that I collect. Sometimes I have to steal them, cause they belong to someone who won’t let me borrow them. Sometimes they’re left in my nearness or in my path, and I just pick them up.
The third file is a memory of a scene in a high school movie, which I was playing back and forth until the VHS cassette was quite noisy at that particular place. It was a scene that depicted a wet t-shirt contest and the location was a messy market, or a party. In the crowd, which was composed of only young noisy men, was a tank of glass reminding one of an aquarium half filled with water. A flip ramp was installed inside the tank where a woman only wearing a white cotton T-shirt was sitting. Attached to the ramp was a rope leading through various shackles out into the excited all male crowd, armed with the power over the situation they could now, when least expected, pull the string and make her drop down into the water.

A period of less work and more thought! I’ll be presenting new works on Frieze Art Fair NY and I also have a museum solo show coming up this spring. But besides that, I’ll try to slow down and let the following paintings load air, they’re for real and have to take their time.

I wish I sometime got funds to build a glass roof over that specific spot of the meandering river in the woods, which I described. So I can have it as my studio. But until this crazy and self-absorbed dream doesn’t come true, I hope I do the same as now; struggling and painting me out of my dark room into the light, but with a lot of more skills and experience than now.