Text on the back: Who painted you? Nobody. I dreamed myself.
The texts hidden on the backs are neither comments nor titles. They appear as short dialogues, statements, or inner voices.
Only in the chronological sequence of image and text does the complete work emerge.
Language doesn't serve as an explanation here, but as a shift in perception.
The complete work comes about through image and text.
Language doesn't serve as an explanation, but as a shift in perception.
The cycle RETURN OF THE COUNTENANE examines the face not as a portrait, but as a place of memory, transformation, and inner experience. The depicted figures are not individual people. They appear as symbolic beings between human, mask, animal, and sign. Every face arises from a layered painting process. Color is applied, covered, revealed, condensed, and destroyed again. Layers build up on one another like memories. Lines, traces, scratches, and relief-like structures remain visible and make the creation of the images comprehensible. The surface itself becomes a bearer of meaning. Recurring motifs—eyes, plants, animals, masks, and archetypal signs—form a visual language between dream, myth, and existential experience. The materiality of painting always remains present. Acrylic paint, pigments, layering, and textured surfaces create a tension between figurativeness and physicality.
In their recurrence, the face becomes a projection surface for human experience – a place where memory, perception, and imagination meet.
Not who we are, but how we appear.
Not what we feel, but how we are seen.
Not what we show, but what shines through us.
