The many faces of the inner self

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My works explore our contemporary identity, shaped by tensions between a range of polarities: self-creation and social identity, the need to belong and the desire for emancipation, the aspiration to permanence and the urge to change. Identity today is multiple, discontinuous, fragmented, and elusive. My creative process reflects this shifting hybridity. (…) My artistic gesture calls upon the inner dimensions of identity; it leads me back to our earliest psychic structures, to the formative experiences of childhood, and therefore to our relationship with origins. In this way, I express the genesis of my humanity, and, in doing so, I create a kind of magical mirror for anyone in search of themselves.

With each work, creation is an act of bringing something into the world. The artist’s fundamental mission is to create new worlds. I continually question our contemporary identity as hybrid, cross-cultural, and nomadic. This inquiry takes shape through my enduring fascination with portraiture in its many forms: painting or printmaking, drawing or sculpture; supports and surfaces placed in tension or in dialogue — textile, plaster, wood, paper, or pixels. Yet what interests me is not the figurative portrait, but the reconfigured portrait: the multiple inner self.

Have you ever tried looking at yourself intensely, steadily, and for long enough in a mirror? After a while, your face begins to appear shifting, floating, changing — as though countless versions of yourself were suddenly passing before your eyes in a kind of kinetic slideshow. Shamans say these are our lives unfolding, our spirit animals taking shape, our soul revealing itself.

These imaginary worlds call to be unveiled in order to restore humanity to a dehumanized contemporary world. To transform reality in this way is to expose the illusion of our perceptions and the fragility of our beliefs. It is to show how manifold our fantasies are — fantasies that seem so real to us that wars are still waged in their name.

What I seek is to bring together this vision of the world that we share: reality is not what merely appears, but what truly is. Essence surpasses appearance; art reconfigures. To transform reality together is to bring our imaginary worlds within the reach of the work itself.

Relational practice, socially engaged art, and cultural mediation are central to my commitment to re-enchanting the environments we inhabit and weaving connections with other artists and other communities. When we create together — beyond languages, beyond differences, beyond the challenges of our contemporary world — art soothes us, reconciles us, and brings us together. And when we come together, our voice carries farther and higher.

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