Artist Statement

I paint what cannot be remembered but refuses to be forgotten — the imaginal residue of culture, family, and self that shapes who we become before we know to ask the question.

My work investigates the imaginal mind — that generative space where memory, culture, and individual consciousness converge. This is not the imagination as fantasy or escape, but imagination as the primary medium through which we construct reality, absorb tradition, and negotiate identity. Through painting, I trace the invisible architectures that shape who we are, questioning how we inherit, transform, and ultimately transcend the narratives we are given.

Central to this inquiry is the relationship between cultural formation and individual autonomy. We do not choose the symbols that first populate our inner worlds — they arrive through family, language, place, and history. Yet within this inheritance lies the possibility of transformation. My paintings occupy this liminal territory: the threshold where received meaning meets emergent selfhood.

I work with oil, pigment, and collage to build layered surfaces that embody this process of cultural sedimentation. Each painting accumulates its own history through successive applications and erasures — preserving traces of what came before while allowing new forms to emerge. The finished work exists as a kind of archaeological site where past and present coexist, where the buried and the visible maintain an uneasy dialogue.

The imagery that surfaces in these works draws from personal and collective archives: family photographs, cultural iconography, bodily fragments, and symbolic forms that carry the weight of transmitted meaning. These elements appear not as illustrations but as presences — partially obscured, transformed by their passage through paint, refusing either clear visibility or complete disappearance.

I am particularly drawn to the body as a site of inscription — the ways in which family history, cultural expectation, and personal experience mark themselves on flesh and psyche. The figures that emerge in my work are never whole; they are fragmented, layered, interrupted. This formal choice reflects a deeper truth: that identity itself is assembled from fragments, never unified, always in process.

My practice is informed by depth psychology, phenomenology, and the study of symbolic systems — though it remains fundamentally visual and material. I am less interested in illustrating ideas than in creating visual experiences that activate the imaginal capacity of the viewer. The paintings ask to be encountered slowly, allowing their layered surfaces to reveal themselves over time.

Ultimately, this work is concerned with the question of freedom: not freedom from tradition, but freedom within and through it. How do we become authors of our own lives while remaining faithful to what we have received? How do we honor inheritance without being imprisoned by it? These questions have no final answers, but they can be lived — and painting is one way I choose to live them.

Gargobre

Brooklyn, New York, 2024

Gargobre

Brooklyn, New York, 2024