Embodiment
2019–2021
oil/acrylic on sololite/wood
various sizes
These paintings, which in my retrospective I decided to call Embodiment, are some of my first paintings. I am getting colors in my hands, and so without any artistic education but full of emotions that want to come out, I have painted my first paintings. This is already where my interest in people, human emotions and thoughts, and the connections between people is formed. The expressively colored bodies with a fauvist touch are the personifications of various inner processes and feelings. In my first paintings, I am not really thinking about the role of the audience yet. I take my creation at that time mainly as self-reflection and a kind of escape, perhaps because it is happening mainly during the COVID period. It was also in the period of my adolescence. So there was a sort of anxiety building up in me, which I used to see as an important part of human existence. At that time, I was interested in existentialism, absurdism, and a sort of play of opposites. I therefore end my first annotation of my work with the sentence: ''And thus, with a brush too small for too large a format, I paint a soul I don't believe I have." The statement is still true, even though I have bigger brushes nowadays.
I often painted on upcycled materials, such as pizza boxes, closet doors, and various discarded panels, among others. I deliberately combined various, often depressing subjects with cheerful colors in my paintings as a way of presenting my view of the world at the time. I wanted to point out that even in a world that lacks meaning and where anxiety seems to take center stage, we can still create beauty in our lives and we can still enjoy it.