The Labyrinthine Ossuary

I have never believed that a medium is inherently superior to another. Every material carries its own way of thinking. Yet tempera on wasli paper has become the only surface that does not ask me to compromise. If egg tempera did not demand an inflexible ground, it might have been my medium of choice. It is possible to work with it on heavy paper or stretched canvas, but eventually the dried skin of egg and pigment will crack with a slight bend

What keeps bringing me back to tempera is not tradition or permanence.

I work with pigment diluted almost to the point of disappearance. The wasli paper drinks every wash instead of resisting it. Hundreds of translucent layers accumulate so slowly that I often forget where the image began. Eventually the light no longer appears to fall on the painting, it seems to rise from somewhere beneath its skin. Sometimes the background becomes more luminous than the forms themselves, as though the painting has found a source of light deeper than representation. I have often felt that this hidden light is brighter than the sun because it does not illuminate objects, it illuminates perception.

But the real reason I cannot leave this medium is that it refuses to let me lie.

Every layer remains partially visible. Every hesitation, correction, failure and change of mind continues to breathe beneath the next decision. The painting remembers everything I wanted to forget. It becomes a record of doubt as much as conviction.

That is how I want to encounter myself.

People speak of nakedness as the removal of clothes. I have never believed that. Clothes are easy to remove. Illusions are not. Delusions are not. The stories inherited from family, language, culture and memory cling far more tightly than fabric ever could. My work is an attempt to stand before my own psyche without those disguises, even if only for a moment. It is an impossible task, but the impossibility is precisely what keeps me painting.

I have no desire to erase the evidence of becoming. I do not want to present an image that pretends it arrived through effortless genius , a single perfect stroke delivered by certainty. Certainty has never made anything worth looking at.

My paintings are built through thousands of uncertain marks. Every stroke carries the possibility of failure. Most of them fail. They remain there anyway. I owe them that honesty. The image is not born despite those failures but because of them.

perhaps this is why translucency matters so much to me. It is not merely an optical phenomenon. It is an ethical one. The painting refuses concealment. It allows its history to remain visible. It admits that beauty is not the absence of wounds but the condition in which nothing has been hidden.

'The Labyrinthine Ossuary' Tempera on hand burnished Wasli paper 2026

Tempera allows the painting to keep its scars, just as the body carries the memory of its own repair. I have a scar across my chest that will outlive me, healing does not erase the past.

If there is any moment of revelation in my work, it is never because I controlled the image. It happens much later, after enough layers have dissolved the illusion that I was ever in control. Only then does something unfamiliar begin to look back at me. I do not want to call it inspiration. Clairvoyance feels closer--a few seconds where perception is no longer filtered by the stories I tell myself--- everything appears as it is