Safflower oil and walnut oil on wood panel.

43x52x3"

About this artwork

An arboretum is a botanical collection composed exclusively of trees of various species, usually designed as a landscaped area.

Intended largely for scientific study, arboreta were originally created as a section within a garden, or a larger park for specimens of mainly non-local species.

Today, many modern arboreta are found in botanical gardens as living collections of woody plants.

Artwork Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osnBn5_w5qU

Oil on canvas.

48x34x2.50"

Made in January 2022, this heavy sculptural painting is actually composed entirely of blue pigments.

The colour Prussian Blue, which appears almost black to the eye, is actually translucent; its vertical prismatic texture allows light to reflect off the surface of the canvas, accentuating the luminosity of the lighter pigments.

Oil on canvas.

60x48x3"

Part of the Musical abstractions series and solo exhibition, the inspiration for this painting comes from the iconic song ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ by Nirvana, whose album Nevermind engendered the grunge movement of the 90s by his lyrics that express an existential malaise, reflecting the breakup of the family unit and the difficulty of North American adolescents to consider their future.

This album sounds like a cry from the heart, that of a disemboweled youth, tortured—Kurt Cobain’s—from which it emerges a feeling of instinctive urgency that strikes a nerve and to the bottom of the guts, to the point where we confuse this pain with ours... It's hardly surprising that the youth of that time identified itself to it so easily!

But contrary to popular belief and Charles Cross's insinuating biography of fiction 'Heavier Than Heaven', the lyrics of Smells Like Teen Spirit are in fact seemingly meaningless: in his interviews during the 1990s, Kurt Cobain kept changing and exaggerating the story by trying to explain its meaning.

Indeed, drummer Dave Grohl reportedly said he did not believe the song had any message whatsoever: "To see Kurt write the lyrics of a song five minutes before singing them, you'll find it a bit difficult to believe that the song has a lot to say about something. You need syllables to complete this space or you need something that rhymes."

Inspired by heavy metal, independent rock and hardcore punk, grunge is characterized by heavily saturated guitars and variable time signatures, and apathetic lyrics that address the anxieties of adolescence. Compared to other forms of rock music, the grunge aesthetic is more refined; many grunge musicians have been noticed for their dirty look and the rejection of theatricality, hence the origin of the stylistic name—the word "grunge" literally meaning "crass".

Oil on canvas.

60x48x3"

Part of the Musical Abstractions series and solo exhibition, the title of this artwork was chosen in reference to a song bearing the same name by the new wave band, the Talking Heads.

Upon listening to it time and again over the months preceding the making of this artwork), I kept thinking about the lyrics in how they seemed to resonate with me in a certain way, as if they talked about the challenges and hurdles of being a full-time artist, the insane amount of pressure felt trying to live from our art, of “burning down” a decent career to avoid “bursting into flames”, “listening to ourselves” and “jumping overboard” in a leap of faith to follow our dreams in the hope that we “might get what we’re after…”

Unbeknownst to me at that time, the band’s lead-singer and guitarist David Byrne had once declared in an interview that the lyrics as were in fact completely meaningless, written by first throwing and making nonsense syllables over the music only to fit with the rhythm and the phrasing. In that perspective, one could qualify the text of the song as a form of abstraction, since without direct meaning or representational of any reality!

And so, a parallel can be drawn here with both the song and this piece: with the propensity of the mind to fill in the blanks when confronted to abstract art, each and everyone “sees” something slightly different, interpreting the piece by drawing from their own personal experience as an attempt to find a sort of familiar ground to relate and base itself into.