“Don’t protect me from what I want.
Let me find it,
name it, and have
the courage to follow it.”
My practice explores non-exclusive intimacy, the politics of desire, and the possibility of relationships built beyond conventional social structures. Across paintings that range from miniature to nearly body-sized, from flat saturated compositions to closely cropped fragments, I work in oil to open spaces for emotional openness, radical sincerity, and forms of closeness grounded in trust and freedom rather than possession. Color, drawing on Michel Pastoureau’s reading of historical and cultural associations, functions as an autonomous conceptual language — carrying psychological and emotional weight beyond the figure itself.
The line that opens this statement is a reframing of Jenny Holzer’s Protect me from what I want. By inverting the proposition and extending it into an assertion of agency, I deliberately shift the focus away from protection from desire toward the recognition of desire itself — and toward the question of how desire is shaped by external systems of power, economy, and culture. I am not interested in romanticizing desire, but in distinguishing what belongs to the subject from what has been produced for them by social, economic, and cultural systems. I am concerned with how desire can be embodied ethically — attentively, in relation to others — and what forms of behavior might protect human vulnerability without destroying the fragility of social space.
The practice investigates how desire is formed within contemporary psycho-political and bio-political systems. I approach censorship not only as an institutional or visual phenomenon, but as an internal mechanism shaped by shame, normativity, and the socially sanctioned models of love we inherit. Non-exclusive intimacy and the multiplicity of emotional bonds become ways of questioning ownership, monogamy, and the fixed identities they require. I am drawn to encounters with otherness that begin in curiosity and pleasure rather than fear — encounters that widen, rather than secure, one’s perception of another person. In the paintings, intimacy ceases to be a purely private sphere and becomes a political space in which power, the gaze, and the right to desire are continually negotiated.
The work moves across several painterly lineages. The earlier series, with their saturated planar palette and household-object iconography, are in dialogue with David Hockney, Henri Matisse, Alex Katz, Tom Wesselmann (whose graphic confidence I claim while displacing the position of his gaze), and Milton Avery, whose attention to color and to the domestic scene is foundational to my own. The more recent work, with its muted palette and severe cropping, inherits the interior warmth of Édouard Vuillard and the close-cropped skin handling of Marlene Dumas, and stands in dialogue with contemporary painters such as Jenna Gribbon and Sasha Gordon. Conceptually, the practice resonates with Michel Foucault and Byung-Chul Han on the regulation of the body and permissible forms of desire, and with Susan Sontag’s erotics of attention, Anaïs Nin’s interior eroticism, and Georges Bataille’s threshold between the erotic and the ethical.
Relationships between figures in the paintings exist as shifting, multiple systems in which feeling takes precedence over fixed emotional or social roles. The practice proposes intimacy as an act of attention — a shifting of focus away from the self and toward the other, an exercise in emotional freedom. Through sensuality and bodily tenderness, I open spaces in which new forms of relationship can appear not as threats to the existing social order but as possibilities for a more honest, caring, and attentive coexistence.