I am interested in exploring universal themes through private questions. I am preoccupied with the issues of identity, love, death, loss, reality versus fiction, dreams and memories. Recently I have departed from strictly using personal memorabilia (family photos, letters between my parents, etc), and started to incorporate personal artifacts of people I have never met. I have been exploring the interplay between personal and universal by “adopting” other peoples’ lives, remembering their memories, dreaming their dreams. Within these new works, I am interested in constructing a certain mystery, create hidden introspections and multiple meanings that invite you, the viewer, to question, and hopefully, enjoy my work. In a world hyper-saturated with images, I still believe that everything is possible, anywhere, anytime. I have always believed in parallel universes in which the past and the present coexist in different dimensions. From time to time, they meet through gates that no one could precisely define or locate. I hope that my art could often function as one of those gates. I have been living in the
United States for 18 years now, living in a primarily visual culture. Shifting from my artistic beliefs rooted in a European classical/ humanistic tradition to the fast-pace of a commercial culture was also bewildering. How do we choose? How do we find meaning in this visual pandemonium? Some images are subversive, and feel like rust, slowly decaying our perception of reality. Then, there are the one-nightstands of commercial photography, the streets, the museums, the television, the ads, the movies, the fashion statements, the unforgettable and the forgivable. Other images, the apologizing images of a Golgotha of worn shoes at Auschwitz, the mountains of eye glasses, the suicide bombers, the forgotten tools of introspection of the past century that has failed to see and learn from its own wounds, are competing for our attention as well. We live in an enormous, constantly changing puzzle. I am trying to connect my sensibility with the viewer’s. In this light, my new mixed-media compositions are riddles born out of the juxtaposition of the real and the imagined, the private and the universal, the desire and the cancelled desire. I believe in beauty as a way of putting order in chaos. What I do is a reflection of my interest in philosophy, music, photography, literature, film, nature, and history. I find amazing sources of inspiration in everything surrounding me: my students’ work; my walks around the streets of New York City or Paris; a Mahler symphony; Proust and Borges; a Godard film; a graffiti-covered wall; an old photograph found at a flea market. Meaning is never a one-way road, and therefore is always a result of collaboration between what I am trying to communicate, and what you are willing to see. And maybe you will find that humanism could do more than survive in that precious space between Paris Hilton and Abu Ghraib.
