Artist Statement

My paintings are contemporary allegories that intertwine historical imagery with modern mass culture to form layered, theatrical compositions. Rooted in Renaissance and Baroque traditions, they embrace the grandeur of classicism while unsettling its authority through anachronistic intrusions—shark balloons, children’s toys, consumer goods, and synthetic textures executed with reverent precision. These disruptions challenge conventional hierarchies of taste and meaning, collapsing distinctions between permanence and novelty, cultural inheritance and disposable excess. 

Figures appear as if lifted from sacred art or classical portraiture—draped in furs, posed in gestures of devotion or ceremony—but their gravitas is undermined by the objects that surround them: inflatable animals, party costumes, commercial detritus. These scenes borrow from the language of theatrical staging, but instead of reenacting history, they present it as porous and performative—a set of gestures slipping between ritual and parody. 

Humor and artifice serve as critical tools. They loosen the grip of inherited iconographies, allowing historical imagery to be fractured and reassembled into something stranger, more mutable. I am interested in how visual systems of power—religious, imperial, or commercial—rely on spectacle, and how those spectacles persist even as their meanings shift. Painting, for me, becomes both a stage and an artifact—a place where history wears a costume, and the image invites belief just as it begins to unravel.