Heidegger once said that ‘to make space is to gift place freely’.
I make space. An endeavor that itself is space. It is to intervene into matter at the same time as to represent her. This duality seems at once to deny and affirm itself: matter, located in space, becomes an expression of space without losing her own entity-being.
My approach to matter is nourished by spatialist sources. Lucio Fontana affirmed that “it is no longer the figure as painting, but the painting as figure that is destroyed, perforated;” this is the artistic object. Because all art is creation-destruction and one act cannot be without the other, in my own work I began cutting, breaking and ripping in order to mend and rebuild from the scraps. I represent spaces, but I do so by creating new space for them. I give them new entity-being.
I seek, now more than ever, to apply deconstructionist principles to painting: I seek rupture, the fragmentation of space, a measured chaos as a way of researching and working toward a new construction-deconstruction of reality. Space created to host space. Deconstructionist architects started with classic structures in order, after a process of structural re-formation–a deeply vital process of destruction-construction, to create new spaces-realities. I look to follow these principles in painting. Classic spaces, uninhabited, hosted in new realities that can fuse with them and offer new being to them. A being-in-itself. This measured chaos is at once a provocation and a letting be, an end and a destruction, a reconstruction. A sensitive and sensorial dynamic. New spaces offered to the spectator, who will be the one to live in them and wander through them. Spaces of absent humanity, signifying the dehumanization caused by us in our own world. I empty my spaces of humanity so that others may fill them. Spaces where we may give new form to our selves in our deeper interior. Spaces in which to re-inhabit our selves, to re-exist, to re-create.
In a world invaded by new technologies, I am still painting, in the belief that painters will always contribute something different. Matter, the tactile element of being, so inherent in human beings, will always be the means through which we communicate with our fellow beings. Painting will not die. There will ever be painters.