THE MEDIUM’S TRICK & THE MATTER’S TRUTH (2026)
200x200cm, blood on canvas.
The world takes shape as the light of the real is filtered through a membrane, a living, shifting surface woven from language, patterns, narratives. Yet we lose awareness of this skin-like film, a trick where the entangled whole becomes visible only as separate parts. I seek a way back, to observe the membrane, and perhaps to make it visible to others.
Numbed by distractions and dopamine fixes, saturated by an artificial spectacle that replaces embodied experience with a stream of weightless images, I felt debased. In my fly-infested studio, I sought a feeling to pierce the veil, and found the real at the bottom of a jar of gore. Sinking, I felt catharsis.
Alchemy, for me, is a method for studying processes, above all the process of meaning making, how attention changes both the perceiver and the perceived. These works are my instincts swallowing the rational self, an unmaking that dissolves rigid ways of seeing. What I show are the traces of a ritual where inner workings become visible.
(Animal) blood is transgressive, heavy with mortality and sacrifice. I atomize it with a paint pistol into static, a snow of noise like an untuned television. Working intuitively, I let the particles guide my hand in divination. I join the materials in becoming the medium, embodying the role of Mercurius, the trickster-guide of alchemists. Stretcher, canvas, blood, tools become the circle, and I am transformed alongside them.
What you see is partly what you bring. Living matter, the blood will oxidize from deep red to brown and black, never the same twice, a process that includes your attention.Receive these as presences, membranes breathing materially. Meaning arises in the space between you and the surface, a trick that tells the truth by changing before your eyes.
EXHIBITION HISTORY
Floor is Lava (ONGOING)
Joey Ramone Gallery, Rotterdam
