Your paintings seem to emerge from the meeting point between outer landscape and inner perception. How do you find the balance between observation and introspection in your process?
I would say that I create a free visual assemblage and look for elements that appeal to me. The relationships between them are rather lyrical and intuitive. I believe that this allows me to retain a certain freedom and openness. I view the landscape as a human construct that is only partially comprehensible to me. I think of it, and our way of thinking about it, as something unstable and changeable. It is constantly changing, just like the human paradigm.
I try to capture it in its transformation and understand the relationships that arise within it. I perceive it as a living, unstable organism that is constantly evolving and reshaping itself. When depicting it, I select specific motifs such as roads, electric poles, plants, or cosmological elements and connect them with intuitive, organic shapes. These allow me to connect these spaces with my own experience. For me, this connection is a way of coping with the complexity and elusiveness of the environment that surrounds us, as well as with the human effort to understand it.
You often start with photographs from your travels, fragments of places and light. What happens between the moment you take a photograph and the moment it becomes a painting?
Yes, in my work I often draw on photographs taken outside. I see them as an immediate record of situations, light, and colours that later inspire me when working in my studio. They serve as a visual memory that I return to.
Moving around outside is essential for me – whether I’m walking, running, or cycling, I get into a rhythm that makes me feel good and helps me think. I feel that I first need to “run” or “cycle” it off outside in order to achieve physical calm, experience, and sources that I can later draw on when working in the studio.
The notion of “mental landscapes” appears repeatedly in your work. Do you see painting as a form of mapping or tracing something internal rather than external?
It is more of an internal process. I try to compose a mosaic made up of various relationships between people and the landscape. In my thesis Horizon Synthesis, I focused on the Baroque approach to the landscape, where verticality associated with a religious perspective played an important role. I was interested in comparing the tension between sky and earth at that time with today’s view, where a new form of verticality is emerging: the communication of our mobile phones with satellites that collect data for map creation. This creates a special and unique relationship between the two “spheres,” which is fundamental to my theme of landscape perception and the possibilities of contemporary landscape painting.
Later, I became more interested in the transmission of electrical voltage through the landscape. Electric pylons carry a certain symbolism and have their own nicknames based on the shapes they resemble. Although they are very common in the landscape, I feel that we have learned to partially overlook them. They have a strong physical presence, yet they remain on the periphery of our attention. I like to imagine their cables running through the landscape as threads that serve as an important material in weaving the image of today’s world.
I strive to make the result of my work a layering of reflections on how the landscape can be grasped and understood by humans.
In your recent works, human figures seem to dissolve into the landscape, almost becoming elements of it. What does this merging represent for you?
Some meditation on the shifting boundary between people and the landscape in which they inhabit, and how they shape each other. I like to connect these spaces in my paintings and let them merge into each other.
There’s a quiet spirituality in your use of light, something Baroque yet restrained. What do you think about light when you paint? Is it symbolic, emotional, or purely formal?
All three aspects are important to me. Visuality comes from light, which is why I look for compositions of light and dark areas that keep the image dynamic without disrupting or breaking its rhythm.
I often imagine dark areas as a kind of eyes – deep, impenetrable places from which dynamic, drapery-like shapes of visible structures grow. I feel as if it were impossible to see into these places, but at the same time, increasingly recognisable fragments emerge from them in a spiral. A kind of dark wheels that enable the car to move.
How do you approach colour? In many of your paintings, the palette seems to hover between the organic and the otherworldly.
When working with colour, as when working with form, I am interested in the relationship between light, landscape, and the human body. The colours are usually based on real scenes that I perceive outdoors, but sometimes I choose them deliberately to disrupt my certainty and open up space for a new perception of the image.
For figures, I most often use light, earthy, or flesh tones, which for me connect the colour of human skin with the sandy surface of roads. I am interested in how biomorphic structures resembling body tissue or organic forms appear in the landscape and how these scales mirror each other. I also like to capture different light sources, such as the setting sun or street lamps.
