A Landscape After the Leviathan
For me, collapse has already happened. My painting begins after it. This “after” is not a quiet ruin or the empty space following an event. It is a continuing condition. Structures lose authority and keep operating. Images lose belief and still organise perception. Lies age, then begin to take on form.
I am concerned with these active remains. They may once have been monuments, bodies, animals, symbols, or landscapes. They may also be shells left behind after repeated use. Meaning has loosened without disappearing. It clings to surfaces, colours, pressure, and structure, like a natural order accepted for too long.
My artistic research begins from this point: when authority loses its clear centre, how does culture continue to produce, maintain, and digest meaning? Collapse changes the appearance of power rather than bringing it to an end. This question opens onto a deeper existential condition: without a final witness, has existence truly taken place? Without an ultimate force to guarantee meaning, one still lives within illusion, systems, memory, and desire, and remains responsible for this life.
Painting allows me to remain where this question takes place. Forms grow out of remains, then are dragged back into chaos by the material. Bodies become terrains, ruins grow like organs, and animals become phenomena shaped by looking, fear, and projection. The structures within the painting cover, support, contaminate, and collapse into one another, forming an internal climate without a clear origin. In this climate, existence does not have to prove itself or immediately acquire value. It can appear in an unstable, hesitant, even damaged form.
I increasingly understand myself less as the controller of the image. The painting begins to generate itself from its own remains, like a structure learning how to survive. Meaning that has already loosened becomes a ghost within the painting. I become more like the painting’s attendant, witnessing how it continues to move after collapse. For me, painting is precisely such a place: it offers no answer to the existential question, but allows the question to be seen, endured, and temporarily held.
