This and the other paintings here are part of a series of works following the theme of Sparagmos - a Greek term meaning dismemberment followed by rebirth.
They feature deconstructed human bodies, contorted and extended, trying to exit themselves and merge with their surroundings. They are a self-portrait or a mirror, as I think of the action of paintings as equivalent to that of my characters - always trying to spill something out of themselves in a desperate attempt to become more than themselves. They ooze, spit, ejaculate, lactate and melt, braking the borders of their paint-skin into a background of watery, thick, scarred whites.
They are always hermaphrodite and multi-gendered , transforming their bodies into fountains of desperate excess.
My work is action based and processual. Each paintings starts directly on the canvas with no preparatory sketch. A scene takes shape intuitively, following the movement of my own body and the vicissitudes of the imperfection of the canvass and paint flow. But it is never enough, like my characters, the painting itself tries to be more than itself, and to do that it has to be dissolved. Each scene is erased and recreated again and again and again, covered in layer after layer of plaster, paint, and pencil lines.
As I paint each painting becomes a burial mound of older paintings, only from which a rebirth is possible.
In this way the process and the subject matter merge in an attempt to enact and represent the desperate attempt to transcend finitude - in a belief that painting is an avenue to achieve it.
I am greatly influenced by my researches in mythology and comparative religion, as I see them as potent gateway to the basic substructure of the collective unconscious and therefore umbilically linked to the function of art as I see it - dealing with the inability to accept the world as it is and the struggle against our mortal condition. I scavenge the history of art and in legend to find compositions and stories that resonate with these themes and then use them to inform and guide my work. They provide a model for the work process and to the imagery.
