A recurring interest and main concern of mine are images that address history, conflict and war. My process often begins with research into a news event, a photograph, or an historic episode. Every form of source material has its own set of parameters, both visual and contextual. The distinctive character and subject of each of my sources dictates the mode of painting I choose to apply.

 

Events that unfold at various moments in time and in different parts of the world might seem unrelated at first. In my work I attempt to outweigh any temporal and spatial distance by asking what these events have in common. Besides their political and historical implications, my paintings share a sense of absence. A Ku-Klux-Klan member faces a dark and possibly vast space, a fighter’s soiled socks rest on a monochromatic ground, dispersing smoke and snow-like particles populate unspecified sites – but what caused them to be there in the first place? It remains unknown why these objects present themselves to us or what brought them there.

 

This lack of information or context on behalf of my paintings is partly failure and accomplishment: the full scope and reach of an event cannot be possibly contained within the frame of a painting. But to question representation and thereby reveal its boundaries, painting has to take greater risks, allow contingency and embrace failure.