Yes and no. Symbols and iconography in painting have a direct and profound relationship with abstraction, both historically and structurally. Formalist painters like Malevich borrowed their visual vocabulary and structure from Russian Orthodox iconography, while the Symbolists, in rejecting the approach of naturalists to reality, sought to access archetypes, the inner essence of things, and Platonic forms, which were inherently abstract in the first place. The Surrealists deeply understood and internalized this connection between symbols, icons, and abstraction.
At the beginning of my practice, I was very interested in automatic drawing, a method employed by the Surrealists. For a time, influenced by their methods, I devised a process in which I created drawings, typically taking only 20 to 30 seconds to complete. Most of these drawings were non-representational at first glance. For each painting, I would set aside a series of these drawings and process them further—using methods like scanning, overexposure, and manual or digital editing—to develop a sketch for the painting.
During this process, certain shapes—what you might call iconographic or symbolic—would emerge in the images. Sometimes I would emphasize these shapes, making them more recognizable within the painting. However, I neither deliberately use an iconographic language nor do the shapes hold particular symbolic meanings. I don't like to have any message within my work that I'm consciously aware of. I work with lines, folds, scans, errors, chaos, glue, and other basic tools. Amidst these, shapes emerge that can simultaneously be both personal and impersonal, carrying symbolic connotations. I embrace these shapes in my drawings and paintings, but I don’t go out of my way to preserve them.
While I haven’t used this particular method of drawing and sketching for some time, my current approach still relies on a similar foundation of chaos and an effort to maintain neutrality.
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Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the current state of photography and what is happening to it. Photography—especially its analog form and the technologies built around it—has, for many of my peers, effectively become an exoskeletal remnant, like a fossil extracted from the recent history of the medium. A fossil of an entity that is still alive, but has shed its outer shell and intensified its life in a new form.
Many artists of my generation—myself included—are engaged in a kind of probing and reconstruction of this exoskeleton, as a form of archaeological investigation into the medium's recent past, and a forensic analysis of alternate timelines and possibilities that might have existed in its development. For example, in the work Idea (Light bulb) (2024), a lamp from a darkroom enlarger was used, and the piece alludes to a kind of visual genealogy of the “idea”—from Promethean fire to the candle of the Enlightenment, to the light bulb that appears above a thinker’s head in comic strips. It’s a process that almost every medium undergoes at some point during its rise and decline, under the dissection table of contemporary art.
I see this living entity as reanimated not through digital photography but through AI-generated imagery, which feels, in some ways, more analog—more in line with photography’s origins. These platforms act like both telescopes, spanning history and the present, and darkroom trays, where images are blended into new forms. I’m exploring whether this exoskeleton and the current state of the medium can be meaningfully aligned—whether deeper parallels exist between them.
The element of confinement or obstruction in these works is primarily a way to “frame” the objects. When working with objects—including soft toys—I often think of the fundamental components of classic sculpture: space, movement (time), and forces. Assemblage allows me to disrupt or invert the usual processes of sculptural construction. Things are inside-out. Framing, for me, becomes a relatively passive way of applying force to objects—a kind of contouring or outlining.
For example, in Untitled (2023), the idea for the piece originated from a video I had seen some time earlier on YouTube. It was a 5–6-minute single-shot video of an octopus attempting to escape from the inside of a glass jar by unscrewing the lid. What triggered the making of the work was not so much the jar in which the octopus was trapped, but rather the camera’s prolonged gaze on the octopus and the materiality of the video itself. When later translating that video experience into an assemblage, the camera’s position and the space it was capturing led me to use plexiglass—something that, for me, functions much like a television box: it presents things not as entirely flat but in a kind of two-and-a-half-dimensional state.
Likewise, in the case of the snake in O’clock (2024), the act of framing it revolves around its encirclement by temporal cycles. Initially, I was thinking about a cassette tape—a looped cassette—and the image of a snake in the form of a spiral, or intestines and labyrinths. Over time, my thoughts shifted toward the ouroboros. It was only then that the idea of creating something resembling a clock occurred to me.
O'clock is essentially composed of a sixty-seconds looped cassette tape with ten seconds of ticking sound recorded on it. In a parametric sense, the cassette acts as a stopwatch, as at the beginning of every sixty seconds, we hear the ticking sound for ten seconds. The coiled snake, with its head angled downward, evoked for me a connection between the intestines and the ouroboros.
A significant part of my studio practice is dedicated to writing and note-taking. Writing offers me the distance I need to analyze and reflect on what I’ve done in the studio during the day. The rest of the studio time is, to a certain extent, a response to the processes and questions that emerge during note-taking—and of course, there’s always a great deal of chance and chaos, which are inherent to any form of studio work.
Most of my assemblages and works outside of painting and sculpture usually begin as sketches or drawings. This is also a form of note-taking for me. The execution phase for such works tends to come later, as the piece often evolves within the sketching process.
I find it easier to work on several pieces simultaneously, and the development of ideas is often shaped by the period I’m going through—a kind of attention span that shifts seasonally and over mid-term intervals.
The exhibition text was a fiction piece I wrote the day before the opening while traveling by train from Berlin to Cologne. I had no premeditated plans or structure when writing it. Generally, the process of developing my work unfolds over a period of time during which ideas appear in my mind as images. These are influenced by elements of the upcoming event, including the city, the architectural space of the gallery where the exhibition will be held, and the era I find myself living through.
Initially, these ideas at first may seem unrelated, sometimes even conflicting. I gather these fragments together, and after some time, a cohesion emerges—a tapestry in which these ideas begin to take form. Suddenly, it seems they can coexist in a functional way. This means that the ideas, when juxtaposed, form a network or constellation of meanings and metaphors, which can sometimes be interpreted narratively, conceptually, or even physically-functionally. These ideas typically materialize in the objects I assemble or in the approach I take to constructing the exhibition, its arrangement, sounds, moods, and other spatial details.
So, this network becomes like an object with multifaceted dimensions that cannot be fully encompassed by a single statement. Sometimes, aspects of these metaphors and meanings remain obscure to me even after the exhibition. For example, when I was working on Ghost in the Shell (Entropy) (2024) which I exhibited at Lomex, most of my time was dedicated to creating the sound and modular components. The remaining elements of the piece only reached an executable state about four days before the exhibition. It wasn’t until one or two days after the exhibition that I noticed how much this work resembled Ophelia by John Everett Millais. Due to the weight it carried within the exhibition space—both in terms of its physical scale and its sonic presence—it influenced the reading of the other works as well. At that point, I began deciphering the other pieces using this work as a key, which, on a personal level, led to some interesting results for me. Writing a story instead of a statement was, in fact, my attempt to hype the neutral space of the exhibition and activate this network—something that is often the responsibility of the titles of the works. However, it’s important to note that the statement ultimately represents just one of several potential interpretations of the exhibition. It can simultaneously be seen as one of the pieces within the exhibition itself.
Yes, a main reason for this is that I no longer use drawings or sketches for my paintings. Instead, I paint directly onto the canvas without any prior planning, allowing the painting to evolve in this way. In general, painting for me is a process in constant evolution, which is precisely what I find fascinating about this medium compared to others I’ve worked with in the past.
Drawing based on preliminary sketches is something like molding. However, in my experience—after a period of working on paintings through these so-called “molds” and now having moved away from them—it feels as if the paintings now occur outside of that molding process. A trace of that structure still exists in the painting style and my approach to painting, but since there are no actual preparatory sketches anymore, the act of painting seems to drift from its own starting point and the memory formed by the act of “painting” itself.
It’s something like a melting of memory and getting lost on the way back home. This sense of being lost and drift partly follows the path of my technical drawing, yet at the same time it acts in a more experiential and subjective way. Currently, each painting is filled with elements that somehow prevent a unified focus on the work. But I believe that in the medium term, these elements—born of that very drift—will diminish, and the paintings will once again carve out a path toward simplicity. Something akin to the ebb and flow of the sea.
