People are mirrors of their environments, interacting with the past, present, and ideas of the future, right? What I mean is, where, when, and how mainly define us, passing through us. Therefore, I confound the space and subjects in my work; the characters are not only placed inside a setup, they are the stage themselves. These assemblage-people end up being a joke emerging out of simplified symbols: tits = feminist; cigarette = romantic painter; tongue = rejection, and so on. Sometimes failing at what they’re attempting, as artifacts of lost cultures and fragile ideologies they anticipate a possible defeat.

Okay, maybe my paintings are affected by a kind of new “slapstickism,” in which the image questions the idea of “painting” through an impression of itself as loose, nostalgic, slightly modernist: the symbol of painting. Simplifying ideas to form symbols is a contemporary routine these days; are emojis the new hieroglyphs? Maybe we are involved in an era when the idea of something is more important than the thing itself?

Well, I hope not!