Crossing Rivers

I paint closely cropped details of interior spaces which I see as metaphors for the human psyche. For me, the insides of our houses mirror the insides of ourselves. My work is both deeply personal and universal. While my paintings draw from my own experiences, they also speak to a shared cultural consciousness. By isolating architectural details and removing them from their original context, these spaces become emotionally charged. I am interested in the way people often fixate on trivial details in psychologically heightened states when a single object or surface seems to carry the weight of an entire experience. My work is therefore concerned with both the banality of everyday spaces and the emotional intensity they carry.

The images I paint are fragments of transitory moments, gathered while passing through museums, hospitals, homes, and administrative buildings.These disparate spaces become metaphors for the fragmented nature of contemporary life. Like my photographs, the titles of my paintings are also fragments that I collect along the way. Snippets from online articles, social media posts, overheard conversations, and song lyrics are all jotted down and revisited at a later stage. In 1863, French art critic Charles Baudelaire described modernity as “the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent,” arguing that these fleeting aspects of life should not be shunned, but used to “distil the eternal from the transitory.” My paintings occupy this space between fragmentation and wholeness, between what is fleeting and what endures.

Liminal interior spaces become loaded expressions of the intricacy and frailty of the human psyche. In the buildings I explore, mid-century pressed glass windows serve to obscure rather than to reveal, as light is allowed to enter but vision of the outside world is blocked. I am intrigued by the dualities of windows and mirrors, those thin edges between the real and its reflection, exterior and interior, the known and the hidden...