Statement

My work moves between drawing, painting and photography. These two practices are driven by the same impulse: a rejection of the mediated, the generated and the purely conceptual. They both emphasise the physical, the bodily and the immediate.

These drawings began as pure automatism. When I draw fast under pressure, my hand obsessively returns to the same form: the figure-of-eight garland, the loop that crosses itself and keeps going. The concept came later. Looking at what my hand had been doing, I recognised the lemniscate and all that it represents, and decided to continue with this awareness rather than without it. The framework was adopted, not imposed. Years of drawing followed.

The lemniscate, the figure-of-eight and the mathematical symbol for infinity, arrives already burdened. In neo-Nazi code, it is 88: 'Heil Hitler' twice over. In Chinese culture, 888 is considered highly auspicious. In Jewish thought, the number eight represents that which lies beyond nature and the attainable perfection of seven. This shape carries incompatible histories that cannot be reconciled and will not dissolve.

This is the starting point, the conceptual framework, the provocation. What happens next is physical: the hand takes over. The drawings are created through visceral, automated gestures; the body works faster than thought, and the lemniscate becomes an obsessive motor pattern. The rigid geometry of the symbol meets the uncontrollable variability of the mark. Neither dominates.

The Kabbalistic distinction is not incidental. Seven represents attainable perfection, the natural and completed gesture. Eight exceeds it, going beyond nature and being uncontrollable. This is literally enacted in the drawings: the loop completes itself and keeps going, crossing back over and refusing to stop.

Each drawing is both things at once: semantically overloaded and bodily immediate; mathematically precise in origin, yet anarchic in execution. The series accumulates like a diary, with one gesture following another, and the same form returning under different physical conditions: different pressures, speeds, materials and states of the hand and body. The symbol is never resolved. Instead, it is worn, repeated and exploded.

Each medium has its own moment of épuisement — the point at which the ink thins, the wax drags and the mark loses its charge. This is also the moment to stop. Recharging is the return.

The camera is not a tool for composition or beauty. It provides proof that a body was present, that a surface was touched and that something real occurred. The instrument is chosen as much for what it refrains from doing as for what it does. Grain is not a style. It is what the camera actually sees. The choice of camera determines what kind of seeing is permitted.