Artist Statement

My work traces how standards born of longing shape the human, the social, and the world we construct together.

Facing anxiety, loss and death, I came to see loss not as an object’s disappearance but as the collapse of a relation already built through expectation. I think this through Lauren Berlant’s cruel optimism: the object that animates attachment also wears us down.

I call this structure a Gaze Full of Longing, a generative act that grants reality to absence. In my paintings, forms I discover pareidolically in stained linen meet coded external forms laid over them: two longings on one surface. In Cruel Intimacy, where I now work, they seem joined yet drift apart. In Want.. Wanted.. Or #1, a plane over traces layered like sediments of time holds a stillness that never fully collapses. Dots and curves read as a topographic map, yet the image never settles between discovery and disappearance. The title embodies this: its grammar breaks as the structure it names breaks.

For me, painting is the urge to understand, a field where this structure can be observed and reflected upon. I ask what stance the coexistence of longing, attachment and loss demands of us.